Ethiopia

Breaking New Ground

Beginnings 3
A bird's eye view 4
A land of plenty 6
Menelik the Moderniser 10
Haile Selassie, King of Kings 11
The Derg years 13
The nationalities question 16
Building the Second Republic 21
A life of exile 25
Living off the land 28
The environment 32
Farming and herding 35
Can Ethiopia feed itself? 39
The world's second-poorest economy 42
Education: a way out of poverty? 45
Women's lives: the 15-hour day 47
'May God grant you health' 49
Surviving in the city 51
A land of righteousness 53
The re-invention of Ethiopia 58
Dates and events 60
Up-date: events in Ethiopia since 1995 61
Facts and figures 70
Further reading 71
Oxfam in Ethiopia 72

First published by Oxfam (UK and Ireland), 1995

(0 85598 270 5)
Revised edition published by Oxfam GB, 2003
(0 85598 484 8) Ben Parker
Oxfam GB 1995, 2003
All rights reserved. A catalogue record for this with Abraham Woldegiorgis
publication is available from the British Library.
Published by Oxfam GB, 274 Banbury Road,
Oxford 0X2 7DZ www.oxfam.org.uk/publications
Printed by Information Press, Eynsham
Oxfam GB is registered as a charity (no. 202918)
and is a member of Oxfam International.

This book converted to digital file in 2010

 Map of Ethiopia, showing places featured in this book

Dire Dawa / X Awbare Camp

' OX u . Somaliland
Hargeisa
,. Harar X
Jijiga OHartisheikCamps

Kafa Wollavra
Beginnings

The cradle of humanity

We all come from Ethiopia. Four million
years ago, this land was the home of the
ancestors of homo sapiens. In 1974, near the
Gona river in the Afar desert, archaeo-
logists discovered a partial female
skeleton which added dramatic new
evidence to the story of human evolution.
She was called Dinqenesh ('You Are
Amazing') by Ethiopians, and Lucy by Dr
Donald Johanson, who discovered her.
Her Latin name is Australopithecus
afarensis.
More discoveries in 1994 supported the
theory that our earliest ancestors - the
first hominids to walk on two legs and
evolve away from the apes - were born
along the African Rift Valley, which
passes through Ethiopia, and continues
southwards to Mozambique.
Fragments of bone and teeth in the Afar
desert of Ethiopia give a glimpse into the
dimmest distant past, long before our
ancestors used stone tools or fire, and
migrated out into Asia and Europe.
History is alive in Ethiopia.

Breaking new ground

For the last 3,000 years, a rich and unique
culture has been evolving in Ethiopia. In
the last 30 years, the land has had to
contend with war, famine, and utter
destitution. Medieval churches, hewn out
of the rock, served as shelters from MiG
fighter-bombers. At least half a million
people died of hunger. Now an
impoverished and battered nation is
emerging into an uncertain future with
new borders, young leaders, and a radical
new political strategy. An uneasy peace
prevails, as a new social and economic
order takes shape. The stakes are high.
Keeping body and soul together is still
the challenge for most Ethiopians.
A bird's eye view
A s big as France and Spain combined,
Ethiopia is home to about 54 million
people. In the heart of the Horn of Africa,
it is on the borders between the Arab and
the African worlds. About half the
population is Christian and half Muslim.
The landscape varies from barren, salty
desert to lush, dripping forest. Some parts
of the Afar desert, in the north-east, are
100 metres below sea level. They seethe
with volcanic activity, a moonscape of
Highland areas are sulphurous salt pans and rocky lava fields.
intensively cultivated.
Rising westwards beyond the Afar
Crops are grown
wherever possible, on desert, the land becomes higher, greener,
terraced slopes and and cooler, up to the craggy highlands,
plateau-tops. where plateaux are riven by gorges and
watered by great rivers. The Blue Nile
starts its long journey to the
Mediterranean at Lake Tana, just below
the Simien mountains, where the highest
peaks are topped by Ras Dashen (4,620
metres), Ethiopia's highest mountain. The
great waterfalls of Tissisat ('water that
smokes') at the source of the Blue Nile
were described as 'one of the most
magnificent, stupendous sights in the
creation' by the eighteenth-century
Scottish traveller James Bruce. Dividing
the highlands from north-east to south-
west is the Rift Valley: a vast geological
phenomenon that stretches from Syria to
Mozambique.
#J|3f
 To the west of the highlands are Ethiopia's ecosystems support Above: a lowland
forests; to the south-east, rangelands on thousands of species of plants, birds, and landscape in the
Ogaden region
the border with Somalia; in the far west mammals; some are found nowhere else
are fertile arable plains on the border in the world, and nine of the mammal
with Sudan. To the north and east is species are classified as threatened.
Eritrea, with its 1,000 km coastline along Ethiopia is among the most important
the Red Sea. To the south is Kenya. reservoirs of biological diversity in
At the centre of Ethiopia the capital, Africa, and many crops cultivated Below: Addis Ababa,
Addis Ababa, is the national crossroads. elsewhere, like millet, are thought to have a city of four million
Major roads fan out to the four points of their genetic origins here. people
the compass. A 781 km railway leads
from Addis Ababa to the Red Sea port of
Djibouti.
Ethiopia's million square kilometres
include a rich variety of climatic and
ecological conditions. Population density
ranges from fewer than five people per
square kilometre in the herding
rangelands of the Ogaden to 200 or more
in the central and south-western areas.
Most of the population, human and
animal, is concentrated in the cool central
highlands, settled for more than 5,000
years. Here pressure on land and other
natural resources is increasing.
A land of plenty
E thiopia was settled by peoples from
two of the main lineages of human
ancestry: the Hamitic peoples and the
Semitic peoples (named after Ham and
Shem, sons of Noah). A third line, the
Cushitic ethnic groups, is found
particularly in the south and south-west.
There are now at least 64 languages
spoken in Ethiopia, and perhaps 80
different ethnic groups. The two largest
are the Oromo and the Amhara peoples.
Other large ethnic groups include ethnic
Somalis, Tigrayans, and Gurages. Some
of them are spread over national borders,
so not all are Ethiopian citizens.
Ethiopia, Cush, Nubia, and other
ancient African civilisations merge into
each other in translations of Old
Mural at Axum: the
meeting of the Queen Testament scripture, travellers' tales, and
ofSheba('Makeda') myths. 'Ethiopia' - mentioned several
and King Solomon times in the Bible and in Greek literature
- became a metaphor for remoteness, or
plenty, or simply a land of unknown
dark-skinned peoples. The name
'Ethiopia' derives from the Greek for
'burnt faces'. 'Abyssinia', as Ethiopia was
commonly known by outsiders until the
mid-twentieth century, probably derives
from the word which Ethiopians use to
describe themselves: habesha.
The Ethiopians' national literary epic,
the Kebra Negast, tells the story of the
Queen of Sheba travelling from Ethiopia
to meet King Solomon of the Jews in
Israel almost 1,000 years before Christ.
She then returned to Ethiopia and bore a
son, Menelik I, from whom Ethiopian
Emperors used to claim descent. This rich
brew of myth and fable makes the actual
early history of present-day Ethiopia
almost impossible to trace. But from the
last 2,000 years, parts of Ethiopia can
offer a history, with artifacts, recorded
events, and travellers' accounts.
When did 'Ethiopia' come into
existence, and where was it? Can it be
called one of the most ancient states in
the world, or is it just an ancient name?
Many Ethiopians are proud that the name
of their country and its settlements are
scattered in the most ancient of historical
documents. Others suspect that history
has been manipulated to serve the
interests of those in power, and that most
of the territories of today's Ethiopia bear
little, if any, relation to the ancient
civilisations of the Red Sea.

The empire of Axum

Ethiopia's natural wealth and strategic
location led at the time of Christ to the
rise of an important Red Sea trading and
military empire, with its capital at Axum
in present-day Tigray. The ancient
civilisations of northern Ethiopia
dominated the Red Sea region for almost
a thousand years from 200 BC. A naval
power developed, and Axum's traders
and travellers, using the port of Adulis
on the Red Sea, reached as far abroad as
Egypt, India, and China. Exporting ivory,
rhinoceros horn, and spices, and
importing metal and cloth, Axum grew
wealthy and powerful through trade and
conquest.
Today, Axum is most famous for its
archaeological ruins: obelisks, tombs, and
palaces, and the claim by the Orthodox
Church that Axum is the resting place of
the Ark of the Covenant - the chest
containing the ten commandments
engraved on stone and handed to Moses
by God.
Axum's tallest standing obelisk, 23 Lalibela: built by angels Axum's tallest
metres high, probably a huge gravestone, Christianity was introduced into Ethiopia standing obelisk,
probably marking a
is carved from a single piece of rock. With in AD 341. In the Middle Ages the grave: 23 metres
windows and doors on ten 'storeys', it Orthodox Church built hundreds of rock- high, it has windows
looks like the world's first skyscraper. hewn churches. The greatest are found and doors on ten
With half a dozen others, it has remained near the village of Roha in the Wollo 'storeys'
standing through the centuries and region of the central highlands.
withstood the rumbling of tanks and Beginning in the twelfth century,
shelling during the Italian invasion of workmen and priest-kings constructed a
1935 and the civil war of the 1970s and fantastical complex of churches,
1980s. monasteries, baptismal pools, and secret
 tunnels. Ethiopian legend says that the
whole massive undertaking was inspired
by a dream of King Lalibela, and built
with the help of angels.
The churches are almost invisible until
one stumbles upon them through an
ordinary-looking Ethiopian town. Carved
into the hillside, each of the ten churches
is interconnected by a series of
labyrinthine passages, stairways, and
openings carved in the red rock.
On a cool Sunday morning, the austere
chants of some of the 450 priests of
Lalibela: a twelfth- Lalibela rise echoing from the
century complex of
subterranean places of worship. Deep
Christian churches,
carved out drum beats resonate from the recesses of
of red rock the churches. Worshippers from the town
and surrounding villages kneel to kiss the
rock itself and, wrapped against the cold
in traditional thick, white, gabi blankets,
murmur prayers to the walls.
Skeletons of famous monks are still
stored in crevices in the rocks. Inside the
gloom of the churches, frayed
embroideries shroud the inner sanctum
from prying eyes and tourists' cameras.
Sunlight pierces the open windows in
shafts, and pigeons flutter noisily in the
courtyards. Indian swastikas and Jewish
Stars of David are carved side by side on
the walls, striking evidence of Ethiopia's
position at the crossroads of human
beliefs.
The movable monarchy
After the almost monastic period of King
Lalibela, dynasties came and went,
capitals rose and fell, and power shifted
from the northern Tigrayans to the
central Amharas and back. Society
oscillated between anarchy and feudal
monarchy, closely associated with the
Orthodox Church. Literature and
philosophy flourished. There was no
fixed capital, but the seat of power was
effectively wherever the king and his
army happened to be camped.
Islam had filtered into Ethiopia from
Arabia since the time of the Prophet
Mohammed, and its strongholds were
naturally towards the east of Ethiopia.
From the mercantile city of Harar,
Ahmed Ibn Ibrahim El Ghazi, nicknamed
Gragn (The Left-Handed'), rose up
against the Christian emperor Lebna
Dengel in 1527. Gragn launched a jihad
against the Christians, and over-ran
much of the country, burning churches
and looting gold wherever he went. His
armies, demanding conversion to Islam
or death, reached as far north as Axum.
But travellers' tales of Ethiopia's
Christian Empire had filtered out to
Europe. In response to Lebna Dengel's
appeal, the Portuguese sent a group of
musketeers, who contributed to the
defeat and death of Gragn in 1543.
Hie coming of the Oromo
At about the same time as the Christian
Empire was under attack from the east,
the south was being overtaken by the
Oromo people. They spread north, east,
and west throughout the sixteenth
century, and penetrated the Amhara
areas as far north as Wollo and Gojjam.
Gragn's former power base, Harar itself,
was attacked until a peace agreement
was signed in 1568. The Oromo region
today makes up the heart of Ethiopia.
The conquests and subsequent settlement
of Oromos all over Ethiopia have been
described by one sociologist as 'the
making of modern Ethiopian society'.
Rather than ruling the people of the areas
they invaded, the Oromo tended to
integrate and intermarry. Today, they are
the most numerous ethnic group in
Ethiopia, and one of the largest tribes in
Africa.
to a British military expedition, which
stormed his mountain stronghold at
Magdala in 1868, where Tewodros, crying
'I shall never fall into the hands of the
enemy', shot himself in the mouth with
his pistol. The British force then
proceeded to loot the libraries of the
palace and church nearby, taking
hundreds of manuscripts back to
England. Few have been returned from
the British Museum to this day.
Yohannes IV, a chief from Tigray,
succeeded in holding the expansionist Imperial monument in
forces of both Egypt and Italy at bay, but Addis Ababa: the
was killed in battle against the Sudanese black-maned lion is
the symbol of
Mahdist armies in 1889. Power then
Ethiopia's dynasty of
reverted to the Amhara line, from the emperors, who
central region of Shoa, and Emperor claimed descent from
Menelik II was crowned. King Solomon

The rise and fall of the

Empire of Gonder
As Ethiopia recovered, reduced in power
and territory after 16 years of civil war,
the Emperors moved farther north and
west, close to Lake Tana. A new capital
was formed at Gonder in 1636, which
became the first fixed capital of Ethiopia
since Lalibela. A series of rulers built
solid palaces and castles in the city, and
some finely decorated churches still stand
testimony to the zenith of Ethiopia's
renaissance.
The Gonderine empire itself began to
collapse in the late 1700s, and Ethiopia
disintegrated into an amalgamation of
principalities controlled by warlords.
From the mid-nineteenth century, two
unifying leaders, Tewodros II and
Yohannes IV, started to pull Ethiopia
together again.

Enter the British

Tewodros II tried to gain support for his
reforms and technical schemes by writing
to Queen Victoria. When his letters went
unanswered, he imprisoned a British
consul and several missionaries. This led
Menelik
the Moderniser
E mperor Menelik II was a moderniser
and an expansionist. In a series of
brutal raids on neighbouring peoples, he
tripled the territory of the empire. But he
also managed to withstand the European
'Scramble for Africa', through a
combination of cunning and brute force.
He imported modern firearms in large
numbers, and understood the rivalries
that motivated the Western powers as
they used Africa as a playing field for
their power struggles.
The Italian government had its eye on
Ethiopia, from the vantage point of its
colony in Eritrea. In 1895, the Italians
invaded Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, and
occupied the town of Adigrat.
Menelik assembled an
army of 100,000
troops and moved
north to
challenge them.
When the
decisive battle
took place, near
Adwa, on 1
March 1896, the
Italians were
outnumbered by
about five to one,
and outmanoeuvred.
This humiliating defeat of a
white army in Africa, according to
Ethiopian historian Bahru Zewde,
'stemmed the tide of colonialism'. It also
led to treaties that established Ethiopia's
newly-expanded borders, which have
more or less survived until the present.
The symbolic and historical
significance of the battle of Adwa, which
preserved Ethiopia's independence until
the 1930s, is one of the most potent
ingredients of Ethiopia's special status in
African and black history.
10
During Menelik's reign, Ethiopia saw
the advent of motor cars, Ethiopic
typewriters, piped water, the telegraph
and the telephone, and diplomatic
relations with foreign powers. With the
support of his wife Empress Taytu, a
leader in her own right, he established
the foundations of a modern state: a
bank, a post office, a railway line to the
port of Djibouti, and schools and
hospitals.
While modernising the centre, Menelik
terrorised the periphery. The bitter
experiences of peoples such as the
Gurage, the Wollayta, the Kafa, the Beni
Shangul and the Gimira, who suffered
terrible and brutal conquest, still rankle
today. Tens of thousands of people from
newly conquered regions in the south-
west were sold to be slaves of the
highlanders. Only in September 1923 did
Ethiopia ban the slave trade.
Menelik II is the most controversial
figure in modern Ethiopian history.
Ethiopia owes its borders to his
conquests, and also perhaps owes him its
instability and ethnic disharmony. In
trying to cement together a huge mosaic
of peoples, he was storing up trouble for
his own successors. He left behind a
chaotic struggle for succession, and a
country that had expanded but not
consolidated its new territories.
Kingdoms and principalities, especially
among the Oromo lands, on the verge of
statehood themselves, were
unceremoniously annexed, and forced to
pay tribute to the Ethiopian Emperor.
Menelik's successes in technological
progress have to be set against the
turbulent legacy which his 'African
colonialism' left behind.

A s Emperor Menelik's health
declined, there was a bitter struggle
for power, from which Ras Tafari
Mekonnen emerged as the King of Kings
in 1928. His coronation in November
1930 was a spectacular pageant, designed
to reinforce Tafari's legitimacy as the heir
to the Solomonic line, and to put Ethiopia
on the map internationally. Ras Tafari
Mekonnen took the name Haile Selassie,
which means Power of the Trinity. His
full title was His Imperial Majesty
Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings,
Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.
Kings, diplomats, and journalists were
invited from all over the world to take
part in the festivities, so beginning an era
in which unprecedented numbers of
foreigners were to visit Ethiopia, and
Ethiopians of the elite were to travel
abroad for education and entertainment.
Haile Selassie, during a fifty-year reign,
tried to reform and modernise Ethiopia,
but, at home, was finally overtaken by the
expectations which his limited reforms
generated. His foreign policy, at least,
inspired Africans and people of African
descent all over the world.
Ethiopia was among the first of the
developing countries to join the League
of Nations (formed after the First World
War to ensure peace and collective
security). Admitted to the club in 1923,
on condition of the abolition of slavery,
Ethiopia was soon to find that all nations
were not equal in the League, and that a
weak country without friends or
influence abroad could be abandoned
without so much as a murmur.
The Italian invasion
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and the
Italian army, still bitter about the defeat
at Adwa in 1896, saw Ethiopia as the
Haile Selassie,
King of Kings
natural extension of the coastal colony
they had established in 1885 and named
Eritrea. Haile Selassie saw that the
invasion was inevitable. Although he
managed to buy arms from Western
powers, he obtained no promises of
support from them.
The Italian invasion from Eritrea
began on 3 October 1935, at the same
time as an attack from the south-east,
from Italian Somaliland. The Ethiopian
barefoot army was no match for the
Italians' modern forces, supported by
armour and air power. The Italians were
ruthless in their suppression of civilians.
Mustard gas was sprayed on rural
communities, in
contravention of the
Geneva Convention,
causing terror and
agonising death.
The Emperor
fled to England
days before the
fall of Addis
Ababa, on 5
May 1936. He
spent the rest of
the war in Bath,
agitating for the
liberation of Ethiopia.
But Britain and France,
some historians believe, initially
allowed Mussolini a free rein in Ethiopia,
in a vain attempt to appease his African
ambitions, and keep him out of an
alliance with Hitler.
The Italian invasion and occupation of
Ethiopia was brutal and totalitarian.
Laws tantamount to apartheid were
enacted, and brutal retribution was
inflicted on civilians after any act of
resistance. Mussolini's military
commander is reported to have promised
11
 to deliver Ethiopia 'with or without the
Ethiopians', and was as ruthless as he
promised. At Debre Libanos monastery,
several hundred monks were executed on
suspicion of helping the resistance. A row
of skulls and boxes of bones near a cave
in the cliffs are still on show.
Having routed the Axis forces in
North Africa, the British army supported
the Ethiopian resistance fighters, who
defeated the Italians in 1941. After an
uneasy period of cohabitation between
the Emperor and the British authorities,
who seemed unwilling to restore power
to Haile Selassie, eventually the Emperor
gained an unconditional return to power,
and the inclusion of Eritrea and the
Ogaden within Ethiopia's territory.
The remains of the Italian occupation
can be seen most impressively in the
Ethiopian road system: stunning
switchback passes in the mountains and
long straight highways driven through
the Ogaden desert. The coffee bars of the
capital and the Italian jargon of car
mechanics are reminders of the brief but
influential Italian period.
Post-war Ethiopia
It is hard to say when the Second World
War ended for Ethiopia. Only in 1954 did
it regain all the territories that it had
Haile Selassie I
University, later
renamed Addis
Ababa University,
was established as
an African centre of
learning for students
from the entire
continent
12
controlled before the Italian invasion.
Unwilling to be left without a
powerful military ally again, and
ambivalent about the British, Haile
Selassie entered into a close post-war
alliance with the United States. By the
time of the 1974 revolution, Ethiopia was
receiving about 60 per cent of all US
military aid to Africa, and large amounts
of development aid.
Haile Selassie used the post-war
period as a chance to develop his armed
forces, but also to invest in education,
social reform, commerce, and agriculture.
His downfall came about because he
never dealt decisively with the
underlying problems of landlessness,
political monopolies, and regional
alienation.
The Emperor ruled autocratically (his
divine right to rule ratified by the 1931
and 1955 constitutions), but encouraged
the development of an intelligentsia. He
promulgated constitutions and created a
parliament, but gave it no real power. He
made token appointments of Oromos and
other classes usually not included in the
ruling elite, but did little to encourage
genuine equality. Women's legal rights as
parents were not established until the
1955 constitution.

The 1974 revolution
Political change has rarely, probably
never, come about by peaceful means in
Ethiopia. As early as 1943, a rebellion in
Tigray had been put down with the help
of British aircraft from Aden. Army
officers challenged Haile Selassie in a
military coup that failed in 1960. There
was an Oromo uprising in Bale in the
1960s. War with Eritrean rebels fighting
for independence had been going on for
12 years already, when in late 1973
student demonstrations and strikes broke
out in Addis Ababa. Struggling against a
severe drought and impending famine,
farmers in the countryside refused to pay
their feudal landlords' tax demands. A
BBC documentary film of a famine in the
northern Wollo region during 1974,
edited together with shots of Haile
Selassie feeding titbits to his favourite lap
dog, caused outrage in Addis Ababa.
The Imperial Navy mutinied in
February 1974, and the 'creeping coup'
continued until a council of military
officers, calling themselves the Derg, or
'Committee', elected from the ranks of
the armed forces, arrested Haile Selassie
on 12 September 1974. The self-
proclaimed 225th descendant of King
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was
taken away in a Volkswagen Beetle. The
Emperor, by then a frail 82 years old, was
imprisoned in the old Gibbi palace in
Addis Ababa, where he died of
suffocation nearly a year later.
The Red Terror
The early years of the Ethiopian
revolution were heady ones. University
and high school students who had rallied
against the failures of the old regime
were eager to convert the rural masses to
scientific socialism. 40,000 young people
The Derg years
'In Ethiopia they have established
very radical measures. In a feudal
country, where the peasants were
slaves, they have nationalised the
land and distributed it among the
peasants. They carried out an urban
reform, prohibiting any family's
having more than one house. ... They
organised the families living in poor
urban areas. They nationalised the
principal industries of the country,
revolutionised the armed forces,
politicised the soldiers, and set up
Political Committees.'
(Fidel Castro, March 1977)
took part in the Zamacha ('campaign' in
Amharic), teaching literacy and building
schools and clinics in the countryside.
Land, foreign businesses, and church
properties were nationalised in the early
stages of the Derg regime. A series of
sweeping reforms affected every part of
Ethiopian life and destroyed the feudal
system completely.
But by 1977 the politicisation of the
army had turned the Ethiopian
revolution into just another military
coup. Idealistic dreams faded as purges,
torture, and witch-hunts against political
opponents in the cities turned into a
meaningless bloodbath. This 'Red Terror'
lasted throughout the late 1970s, and
conservative estimates from the human
rights group Africa Watch say that up to
30,000 people were killed.
Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile
Mariam, the son of a night-watchman,
clawed his way to the top of the Derg in a
series of brutal power struggles. He
became Chairman in 1977, at the height
of the Red Terror.
13
 Above: Images of The Derg never managed to reach a Ethiopia became the People's Demo-
Mengistu the peace agreement with the Eritrean rebels. cratic Republic of Ethiopia, controlled by
dictator loom over a It also failed to tackle demands for a single party, the Workers' Party of
May Day Parade,
greater regional autonomy for Tigray, Ethiopia. Open political dissent was
Addis Ababa 1988
Oromo, and Somali areas. Several armed dangerous, and rare. Large numbers of
resistance movements were formed, the political prisoners were detained, and a
most important of which were the Tigray powerful security apparatus silenced all
People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the but a few critics. Tight control was main-
Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). tained over the media: among the banned
The Somali Republic, which had books were the Gospel of St Mark and
always wanted to unite the ethnic Somali Shakespeare's Hamlet.
people within its own borders, launched
its army against Ethiopia in 1977 in
support of the Western Somali Liberation
Front, the Ethiopian Somalis' armed
faction. The Ethiopian army was pushed
back to the highlands, but Somali forces
finally retreated in the face of Ethiopian
reinforcements, spearheaded by Cuban
soldiers, and supplied by the USSR.
Saved by the USSR and Cuba from
defeat in 1978, Ethiopia remained firmly
in the communist camp for the rest of the
Right: Monument to Cold War. Socialist central planning of
the Revolution, Addis the economy was introduced, and a
Ababa. The stylised restrictive agricultural policy gave little
presentation of incentive to Ethiopian farmers. Price
Ethiopian peasants controls and interference in marketing
reveals the
influence of
led to mediocre production of food and
Soviet Socialist art. cash crops.

14
The famine of 1984/85
The terrible famine of 1984 and 1985 was
the result of a combination of war and
drought. Early warnings were ignored or
mistrusted, and by the time the outside
world and the Ethiopian government had
been shocked into action by TV reports, it
would be too late to save the lives of at
least half a million people. The famine
marked a turning point for Ethiopia, and
for the international community. Ethiopia
may never shake off the association with
hunger, and the aid organisations and
donor governments may never again
underestimate the power of public
concern to raise money for disaster relief.
Goaded by the singer Bob Geldof, the
British public alone raised 100 million in
response to the famine.
The civil war
Brutalised by a ferocious but incompetent
leadership, 100,000 soldiers of the
Revolutionary Army died in the civil war
that ravaged Ethiopia throughout the
1980s. The former rebel movements are
still reluctant to release full details of
deaths on their side, but, in Eritrea and
Ethiopia combined, their losses were
possibly almost as high.
Civilians suffered on both sides of the
front lines. In the government-held areas,
forced conscription and arbitrary taxation
devastated communities, and in liberated
areas the Ethiopian Air Force bombed and
burnt schools, clinics, and villages in an
attempt to terrify people into resisting the
rebels. Napalm and cluster bombs were
used on civilian targets. Hundreds of
thousands of Tigrayans and Eritreans fled
from war and drought and became
refugees in Sudan. Ethiopians with money
or education managed to get refugee
status in Northern countries: a brain drain
from which the nation is still recovering.
In the most notorious atrocity of the
war, a key market town in Tigray,
Hawzien, was bombed by Mengistu's air January 1985:
The long trek
force in June 1988. As MiG bombers
to Sudan begins for
pounded the town, helicopter gunships people from Abi Adi,
strafed thousands of fleeing civilians. At fleeing drought and
least 1,800 people died in a single day. war in Tigray
15
The nationalities
question
E thiopia has changed shape many
times during its long history. The
convulsive years of the Derg widened the
cracks in the State's relationship with
Eritrea until ultimately the northern
region broke away completely. Two other
regions and peoples - the Oromo and the
Somali - threaten to detach themselves
from 'Greater Ethiopia'. Their grievances,
and the way they are represented polit-
ically in future, will have far-reaching
implications for the future shape of
Ethiopia, and even for its very survival.
Independence for Eritrea
Eritrea was part of the area known to
Ethiopians as Mareb Melash, until Italy
named it Eritrea, from the ancient Greek
for 'Red Sea'. Parts of today's Eritrea
were first occupied by the Ottoman Turks
in 1572, and then by the Egyptians. The
Italians ruled Eritrea from 1885 until their
defeat in 1941 during World War II.
Asmara, the capital
of Eritrea, benefited
from investment in
industry and public
services during
55 years of Italian
colonisation
16
During this period, Eritrea became
(compared with Ethiopia) industrialised.
A skilled workforce produced goods and
foodstuffs for export to Europe and the
Middle East. While glad to be free of
fascist rule, the Eritreans, accustomed to
a separate identity, had mixed feelings
about joining Haile Selassie's Ethiopia. At
the end of the war, the Allies passed the
problem over to the United Nations,
which decided in December 1950 to
recommend federation with Ethiopia.
This compromise pleased no one. The
Emperor eventually dissolved the
federation, and Eritrea came under direct
control from Addis Ababa in 1962.
Ethiopia's repressive measures in
Eritrea strengthened rather than
suppressed national feeling. Political
activity was banned; trade unions were
abolished; local languages were
suppressed. Resentment against Addis
Ababa developed into a full-scale war.
 Some Ethiopians bitterly resent
Eritrean nationalism, claiming that Eritrea
is part of Ethiopia's historic heartland,
and its people are so closely related to
northern Ethiopians as to be identical.
This may be true, and Eritrea's sense of
national identity was perhaps born of
occupation by other countries and
cultures. But Eritreans feel different, and
thirty years of war only reinforced this.
The Eritrean liberation fronts were for
many years plagued by religious and
ethnic division and rivalry, but one group
rose to become the dominant force and
finally claimed victory and indepen-
dence. The Eritrean People's Liberation
Front (EPLF), officially formed in 1973,
became a disciplined and formidable
organisation, with military, political, and
social sections administering the majority
of the territory which they had gained.
Asmara, the main town in Eritrea,
finally fell to the EPLF in May 1991. The
Provisional Government of Eritrea,
established by the EPLF, held a referen-
dum on independence in April 1993,
which produced a 98 per cent vote in
favour of leaving Ethiopia. The EPLF
dissolved itself in 1994, and within the
government of Eritrea it is now the dom-
inant political party, renamed the
People's Front for Democracy and Justice.
A new constitution is being written.
Ethiopia and Eritrea will always be
closely linked, and economic and cultural
ties are as strong as ever. But the legacy
of bitterness will take generations to fade.
And Eritrea's independence has
weakened Ethiopia strategically, since
Ethiopia is now a land-locked country.
A share of power for the
Oromo
Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, the
Oromo, live in territory that spreads
across central Ethiopia between Sudan to
the west, Kenya to the south, and
Somalia in the east. The Oromo areas,
especially in the west of Ethiopia, are
among the richest and greenest in the
country. Their agricultural land is the
backbone of the Ethiopian economy, yet
they have been devalued by rulers of
every complexion, and their aspirations
have been ignored ever since their
incorporation into the empire. Their sheer
strength of numbers, and the areas they
live in, mean that if Oromia were to
secede from the rest of the country, the
map of Ethiopia would look like a series
of ink spots on the page.
The Oromo, then mainly nomadic
herders, began to migrate into today's
Ethiopia in the fifteenth century. Some
Oromo nationalists claim that they have
roots in their current territory going
much further back than that. In general,
Oromos, despite the ferocity of their
initial campaigns, were settlers, rather
than tyrants. Some studies suggest there
may now be as many as 19 distinguish-
able 'clans' of the Oromo, each of which
has adopted customs, languages, or
agricultural techniques from the original
inhabitants of the area where they now
live. In religion too, Oromos are divided
into Christians, Muslims, and adherents
of the traditional worship of natural
spirits whose God is known as Waq.
Oromos had never been excluded from
holding token positions of power: some
of Haile Selassie's most faithful lieu-
tenants were Oromo. But the Emperor, as
in Eritrea, tried to enforce his language,
culture, and religion in every region,
thereby storing up resentment and
allowing no expression of ethnic pride
except violence. Children were forced to
learn a foreign language (Amharic) at
school and often had to change their
Oromo names for something which the
Amhara teachers could remember easily.
The Oromo Liberation Front, like the
Tigray People's Liberation Front, was
formed soon after the 1974 revolution. It
has now withdrawn from the govern-
ment, and the Oromo people are
represented by a new party, the Oromo
People's Democratic Organisation
(OPDO). If the OPDO cannot meet the
aspirations of the Oromo for greater
recognition and better representation in
politics and society, Ethiopia's present
fragile peace is unlikely to hold.
17
 Secession for the
Somalis?
About 2.5 million ethnic Somalis form the
second-largest region, after Oromia, in
the new federal Ethiopia. The area
identifies with Somalia, to which it looks
for all of its needs in business, trade, and
culture. The region's historical links to
Ethiopia are tenuous at best, and the
impetus towards secession - either as an
independent state, or through unification
with the Somali Republic - is strong. The
discovery of natural gas in the area
makes it strategically important for the
Ethiopian central government.
Most Somalis are herders; their nom-
adic way of life depends on the seasonal
migration routes which follow the natural
cycles. Invisible borders mean nothing in
the desert. The Somalis are now divided
among five countries, as a result of the
colonial period and Menelik's Ethiopian
Empire. The flag of the Somali Republic
A Somali family on
the move: all their has a five-pointed star to represent them:
possessions are Somaliland, Djibouti, Ethiopia, north-
packed on the camel eastern Kenya, and the Somali Republic.
The economy of the Somali regions, in
whichever country, depends on grazing
and water for livestock. When the rains
have been good, water in seasonal rivers
and wells is plentiful, and resources are
shared among the different clans of the
Somali people freely. When resources are
scarce, tensions rise.
The clans are families which can trace
their ancestry to one of the original
immigrants from Arabia who settled in
present-day Somalia. Children are taught
the litany of their ancestors' names,
reaching back a dozen generations into
history, at their mother's knee. This
organisation of society on the basis of
ancestry is mixed with a unique form of
Sunni Islam - liberal, poetic, and
mystical. Decisions are traditionally
made by a shir, or council of 'elders'. In
fact, age has little to do with membership
of the council, but gender does. Any
grown man can take part in discussion,
but women are usually excluded.
Ethiopian Somalis have gained little
from being part of Ethiopia, and, if the
Somali Republic had not been in turmoil people fear them like plagues of locusts,
at the overthrow of Mengistu in 1991, they concentrated on winning hearts and
moves towards separation from Ethiopia minds in the areas they began to control.
might have gathered more momentum. Decision-making involved public
Government forces and secessionist meetings, which all were encouraged
groups in the Ogaden have clashed (and sometimes compelled) to attend.
sporadically for years. Self-reliance and equality between men
Ethiopia needs to offer Somalis and women were the new values, and,
something to make staying within the after centuries of feudalism, Tigrayans
nation worthwhile. With hardly a road, a supported a movement that listened to
telephone, a school, or a clinic to show them and, literally, spoke their language.
for fifty years in the 'great Ethiopian As in Eritrea, the harder Mengistu Lete Birhan, 34, was
family', it will be a key challenge for tried to batter Tigray into submission, the a fighter with the
Ethiopia's new breed of politicians to more determined the people became, and TPLF. Her leg was
amputated after she
convince Somalis of the benefits of young men and women volunteered to
was hit by a tank
staying with Ethiopia. fight in the TPLF in their thousands. shell in a battle for
Morale was high; discipline and political the town of Axum,
A new voice for Tigray control were rigid, beneath a relaxed in 1988.
Just as the Derg failed to resolve the
Eritrean question, it could not solve
Ethiopia's internal problems. The
struggle of regions with different
cultures, languages, and customs for
greater autonomy was intensified by the
overthrow of Haile Selassie. To some, the
Derg represented the continuation of
repressive central control by one ethnic
group, the Amhara. Power had passed
between the Amhara and the Tigrayans
for generations, but the Amhara seemed
to have become entrenched.
The victory of the Tigray People's
Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1991 was the
culmination of decades of northern resis-
tance to the authorities in Addis Ababa.
A rebel group formed in 1975 with just 11
rifles went from strength to strength,
fighting until 1991 - not for independ-
ence, but for the overthrow of Mengistu's
Derg and a new political system.
The TPLF, the EPLF, and the Derg they
both fought against were all, officially,
Marxist-Leninist. For Western powers,
taking sides in a contest between
communists was an unappealing
prospect, so they remained on the
sidelines. But the faultlines of the
Ethiopian conflict were much older and
deeper than political ideology.
The TPLF made a break with the past
in their strategy. Instead of living off the
land, as armies had always done, making
19
 0 300 km exterior. The TPLF hid in caves and could
^ 0 200 miles melt into the rugged scenery during the
day, when the MiG fighter-bombers came
Sudan on patrol. The former rebels claim not to
I ERITREA ^ ^ ^ ^ | have received external support for their
war, and to have captured their weapons
from the enemy; but certainly the
/ .. TIGRAY ...
Eritrean rebels gave the Tigrayans a
/* GONDER ;' '"- helping hand to open another front
\ WOLLO against the Derg.
Life in the war zones, which by the
GOJJAM '"-'. , V" end of 1990 included most of the north of
the country, was terrifying and bizarre.
V'SHOA ;."
/ iA/n \ ^ Markets were held at night, to avoid
. .;'Ababa# ...-'., bombing raids by day. Farmers even
HARARGHE ^**v--
ploughed by moonlight. People passed
^XILUBAEvr\on ;' I ;' ARSI .
through military checkpoints with secret
..'KAFA V /...-'
/ .. ;
-. \ BALE
messages folded under their tongues,
" GAMO ' ready to swallow if challenged. And the
: GOFA : -,. ,.-..
sounds of war became as familiar as a
\V {"""' SIDAMO cock crowing.

^ \ " / Somalia
A federal system for
/
Uganda] Ethiopia
On its advance on Addis Ababa, the
Above: Traditional regional boundaries of Ethiopia TPLF was joined by sister movements
Below: New regional boundaries drawn up by the Transitional Government representing other Ethiopian ethnic
groups: Amharas from Gonder, Gojjam,
0 300 km
and Wollo had their own movement, the
0 200 miles
Ethiopian People's Democratic
Movement (EPDM). In 1989, a multi-
Sudan / ^^^^^^^H 1 ethnic coalition was formed: the
J Eritrea ^^^^^H
i Ethiopian People's Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF). The outlines
\ ^ TIGRAY '. > v ^ of the EPRDF's future political strategy
began to emerge. The 'nationalities
Sj: '-, (' AFARy question' - how to bring harmony to a

BENISHANGUL': ;
f ;
:
AMHARA

;
j

(
( A multi-ethnic country with a history of
oppression and discrimination - was to
be settled by a federal system. Most
/ -. '" ' '/: . ' b i r e radical of all, regions were to be allowed
H^rar
/-' Addis ."' " D a w a to leave Ethiopia if they wanted to,
V\ OROMIA Ababa ; . , . ; . /
without bloodshed.
GAMBELLAV'" 1 .... '" ) OROMIA :. In a manifesto printed just before the
SOMALI /
fall of Mengistu, the EPRDF noted that

1/
:
v...- "' .'-.-..
>-v SOUTHERN \ ..--
) PEOPLES' .-.;.. the break-up of Ethiopia through
( REGION ..' ' peaceful regional secession would be 'a
lesser evil compared with the present
condition of fratricidal war and
Somalia unmitigated destruction'.
Uganda \ ^ Kenya [

20
 Building the
Second Republic
The enigma of the EPRDF invited, with the exception of some
Meles Zenawi, leader of the EPRDF and political organisations based abroad. The
the TPLF, claimed in an interview with conference established an 87-seat Council The monument to
The Independent in November 1989 that of Representatives, in which the EPRDF Karl Marx outside
'the nearest any country comes to being coalition itself held 32 seats. A national the university in
socialist as far as we are concerned is charter guaranteeing the establishment of Addis Ababa:
human rights and democracy was one of the few
Albania'. This caused incredulity among communist symbols
many educated Ethiopians and foreign adopted to serve as a temporary
not to have been
observers. Just as the Berlin Wall was constitution, and a programme was laid demolished since the
falling, the party which was poised to out for regional and national elections. end of the civil war
take over Ethiopia was seeking inspira-
tion from one of the most notoriously
repressive and unproductive Stalinist
states in Eastern Europe.
But when the rebels arrived in Addis
Ababa, the EPRDF, pressurised by
Western powers, especially the USA,
committed itself to political reform and
economic structural adjustment on lines
applauded by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. The story
of the EPRDF's military progress on the
road to Addis Ababa is relatively simple.
But the development of their ideas, the
pressures they were under to adapt their
philosophy as the Communist bloc
crumbled, and the final U-turn in political
orientation are harder to decipher. While
retaining the zeal of 'revolutionary
democracy' that sustained them as a
liberation front, the EPRDF as a political
party have shown themselves to be
supremely pragmatic - or opportunistic.

The Transitional
Government
The EPRDF moved into Addis Ababa on
28 May 1991, re-established order in the
cities, and disarmed and dispersed the
defeated revolutionary army, with the
help of the Red Cross.
A national conference on Peace and
Democracy was held in July 1991, to
which most opposition groups were

21
 Elections in June 1992 established
councils to manage the affairs of the
regional 'states'. The elections were
marred by inadequate preparation,
intimidation, and boycotts. The EPRDF
and its affiliates swept the board.
The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), the
second-largest party in the national
Council of Representatives, withdrew
just before the poll; alleging violence,
intimidation, and vote-rigging, the OLF
returned to military struggle. There was
sporadic warfare between forces of the
EPRDF and OLF through the rest of 1992,
especially in the east. About 20,000
alleged OLF members and supporters
were detained by the Transitional
Government, only released after months
of 're-education' in military-style camps.
Skirmishes still continue between the
OLF and EPRDF, but in military terms
the OLF appears critically weakened, and
many of its political leaders are in exile.
It was an unusual first step for a
victorious army to volunteer to share
power, but in fact expulsions and
boycotts by other parties left the EPRDF
in effective control of the government for
the transitional period.
A poster showing the
voting process for
local elections,
Amhara region, 1994
22
The adoption of a new Constitution of
Ethiopia in December 1994, and elections
scheduled for May 1995 for the national
legislature - the Council of People's
Representatives - mark the end of the
transitional period. Meanwhile, the new
Constitution has enshrined the right of
self-determination for individual peoples,
and a series of sweeping proclamations
has established new regional boundaries
along ethnic lines, and relative autonomy
for the regional administrations.
However, the law on rural land
holding is one of the most far-reaching
constitutional provisions, as Ethiopia's
second republic approaches. The law
provides for State and communal
ownership of land and natural resources,
with individual ownership limited to the
fruits of the individual's labour. This law
is not unlike the Derg's policy on land,
both in language and content.
A comprehensive census of population
and housing, undertaken in October
1994, will provide much-needed baseline
statistics for planning infrastructure and
services. The importance of the census for
economic planning cannot be over-stated.
The currently estimated national
population of 54 million is derived from
the 1984 census, excluding Eritrea, and
assuming an annual growth rate of 2.9
per cent. The 1984 census, the first in
Ethiopia's history, must be treated with
caution, because it was conducted during
the civil war, when large areas of the
country were inaccessible to
enumerators.

The aftermath of conflict

Three decades of war and famine in
Ethiopia have left millions of broken lives,
maimed bodies, and mass graves. Many
people are still picking up the pieces of
their lives, and the future is uncertain.
Lete Birhan, 34, was a fighter with the
TPLF, the spearhead of the victorious
EPRDF forces. She was hit in the leg by a
tank shell in Axum in 1988 during a
battle for the town. 'I could still feel it
when they took me to the hospital,' she
says, but in the end the doctors had to
amputate. She's now a seamstress,
retrained with about 1,000 others, mostly
younger than her, at a centre run by a
government commission for rehab-
ilitating ex-soldiers. 'All of them are
youngsters,' says Tadesse Berhe, General
Manager of the centre. A graph on the
wall in his office shows the terrible toll of
injuries to young people in the war: his
trainees are grouped according to their lodged in his head. The Red Cross Tailoring workshop
disability: blind, one eye, partially brought him back to Wollayta, and kept for disabled war
sighted, one leg (261 people), spinal veterans, Adigrat,
him going with food distributions for a Tigray region
injuries, head injuries. few months. Now he is destitute. He has
Lete is proud of her contribution to the a house, but not even a few pots and
struggle: at least she can console herself pans to cook with. His wife recently died
with victory. She chose to join the TPLF, of tuberculosis, when five months
with the blessing of her family, and spent pregnant, and he and his tiny daughter
nine years in the field. She doesn't know Mimi, who is severely malnourished, are
where she will end up: it depends on living in a nutrition centre.
where the commission will send her. The flotsam and jetsam of the war turn
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers up all over the country. The largest army
fought against Lete Birhan's forces after in Sub-Saharan Africa, 350,000 men, was
only one month's training. Imru He was demobilised in a matter of months;
woken up in his bed in 1988, beaten with soldiers were sent home with only a few
sticks and taken off to join Mengistu's months' rations to tide them over.
revolutionary army. For three years he Women and children who lived at the
was stationed in besieged Asmara, now barracks were evicted. Three years on,
capital of independent Eritrea. Ever since groups of unemployed ex-soldiers still
the battle for Asmara, he has had a bullet stand around in tattered uniforms all day

23
All over Ethiopia, the
rusting debris of war
lies scattered along
the roads
outside churches in Addis Ababa,
playing flutes and begging.
The war at its peak cost US$500,000 a
day. Weapons poured into the country,
mainly from the Soviet Union. Lives were
cheap because guns were cheap, and
minor local disputes became more
dangerous.
Peace has never lasted long in
Ethiopia's recent history. Fifty million
people, mobilised for war, and subjected
to a barrage of propaganda from all sides,
will not settle down quietly into a model
nation-state. Almost any Ethiopian you
meet has memories: someone in the
family was sacked, imprisoned, killed, or
became a refugee during the civil war. As
a result, optimism is a scarce commodity,
and people lead their lives in Ethiopia
looking over their shoulders.
Crimes against humanity
The architects of the reign of terror and
oppression which led to the death or dis-
appearance of tens of thousands of
people during the Red Terror in the late
1970s are now being held to account for
their crimes against humanity.
24
In December 1994, 66 former Derg
officials, including Colonel Mengistu
Haile Mariam and 20 officials in absentia,
were put on trial, facing a charge of
genocide, in addition to crimes against
humanity. In all, 3,400 Derg officials will
be charged with human-rights violations
in a process which will probably take
years.
The grim irony of the trials is that the
systematic genocide of the Derg years
was well documented in minutes of
meetings, taped interrogations, video
film, and official orders, all filed by
meticulous bureaucrats. The archives also
cover the murders of Emperor Haile
Selassie and the patriarch of the Ethiop-
ian Orthodox Church, His Holiness
Abuna Theophulos.
The Ethiopian trials are the first
instance of an African government
holding a former regime accountable for
its crimes. It is hoped that the 'due
process of the law' will help to heal the
bitterness of the recent past, and in turn
engender faith in a truly democratic
second republic in Ethiopia.

Refugees
In the 1980s, when Ethiopia was a
watchword for suffering and starvation
to the outside world, for over half a
million refugees from Somalia and
southern Sudan it was a safe haven.
President Mengistu of Ethiopia
supported the rebels of the Sudan
People's Liberation Army against the
Sudanese government, and Sudan
supported Mengistu's rebels, the TPLF
and the EPLF. President Siad Barre of
Somalia attacked Ethiopia, and Ethiopia
fought back by supporting four different
rebel movements during the civil war in
Somalia. The terrible symmetry of Cold
War alliances produced a zone of refugee
camps in the Horn of Africa, some of
which are now permanent towns.
Hawa Ahmed arrived in Hartisheik,
Ethiopia's refugee metropolis, in 1988
from her village west of the Somaliland
A life of exile
capital, Hargeisa. She came with her
husband and five children. Two children
died in Ethiopia; her husband was
wounded in the leg during the bombing
of north-western Somalia, and has not
been able to work since. They live in a
buhl, a large igloo-shaped house typical
of the nomadic areas, but in Hartisheik
the structure is patched with food-aid
bags and bits of cardboard from old
boxes of nutritional biscuits. The war
with Siad Barre is over, but she still has
not gone back. 'We plan to go back: we
have some land in Somaliland,' she says.
'The rations here are not enough.'
Hartisheik camp could once have
qualified as the second-biggest city in
Ethiopia, housing about 250,000 people.
The water consumption alone was about
1.2 million litres a day. Water, food, and
medicine had to be trucked into the area
in an immense relief operation. The
Displaced Somalis
building a buhl at
Awbare (Teferi Ber)
camp, eastern
Ethiopia, 1994
25
Happy Video satellite
dish, Hartisheik
camp, 1994
market in Hartisheik is now one of the
most important in eastern Ethiopia,
selling everything from Chinese thermos
flasks to biscuits from the last food
distribution. In the centre of the market,
Beshir Yusuf runs the Happy Video. A
large satellite dish sits on the roof of his
corrugated iron building, and 40 or 50
people pay five Birr every night to watch
cable TV. The wrestling is popular.
Returnees
Ethiopia's civil war created hundreds of
thousands of refugees, who fled for safety
to surrounding countries.
Many Ethiopia-born Somalis escaped to
Somalia, fearing reprisals after the
Ethiopian victory in the 1977/78 war with
the Somali Republic. But the anarchy in
southern Somalia after the fall of President
Siad Barre drove them home again,
creating another wave of human misery.
Awbare is a camp for such 'returnees'.
Asked 'Where is home?', a woman in the
camp warily and silently weighs the
26
answer. The wrong answer to the wrong
person might end her entitlement to
rations. Where would she like to be?
'Here.' And if the rations stop? 'Wlierever
the rations are.' In the long run, the
international refugee industry may have
bequeathed only one lasting thing to the
Somali people: the word ration has
entered the Somali vocabulary.
Resettlement
The refugees and returnees are not the
only people to have been uprooted in
Ethiopia. Thousands of others have been
displaced during the last twenty years.
Some moved because of drought or war;
others were forcibly moved under the
Mengistu government's two most
ambitious programmes of social engin-
eering: resettlement and villagisation.
About 600,000 people were moved to
new areas under the massive resettlement
programme of the 1980s. Resettlement
was promoted as a long-term solution to
population pressure and environmental
degradation in the highlands. It seemed
logical: people would be moved from
overcrowded and unproductive areas into
virgin lands elsewhere in the country,
where they could start a new life.
But most of the people in the
overcrowded regions of the north were
unwilling to take the risk of settling in
unknown regions of Ethiopia under any
circumstances. The authorities ended up
forcing people off to 'a better future' at
gun-point. The supposedly 'virgin' lands
to which they were transported were
often occupied by local people of a
different ethnic group, who resented the
invasion. Some resettlers died on the road
to their promised land, and thousands
perished from disease and malnutrition
after arrival. The land which seemed so
green and promising to the planners lost
its fertility after a few seasons, and
couldn't sustain regular cultivation. One
human rights organisation estimates that
50,000 people died during the operation.
Resettlement was in some ways a form
of warfare. The head of the Workers'
Party of Ethiopia for Tigray region,
Legesse Asfaw, was famous for repeating
the saying: 'To kill the fish, you must
drain the pond'. By forcibly removing
people from rebellious regions in the
north, the central government hoped, in
vain, to terrorise the local populations
into resisting the rebels.
Resettlement reached a peak in the
mid-1980s, but the effects are still being
felt. Thousands of unwilling resettlers
have been unable to return home, and
others, having made the return journey,
are finding life harder than ever. Land,
work, and housing are all in short supply.
'Villagisation'
In 1986, Qameru Ahmed, her husband
and seven children were forced to move
house. As part of a grandiose scheme
typical of Mengistu's cruellest follies, she
was to be uprooted so that, for the gov-
ernment, she would be easier to 'develop'.
Villagisation, which in some ways
complemented the resettlement pro-
gramme, was planned to bring Ethiopia's
traditionally scattered homesteads into
'modern' villages, with rectangular
houses arranged in straight lines.
In fact, Qameru was expected to move
so that the government could more
effectively tax and terrorise her family.
When they came to her home area in
eastern Harerghe region, all those who
were reluctant to move were beaten or
shot. The 'committee', composed of local
people in the ruling party, had desig-
nated an area half an hour's walk away
as the site of the new village. All the
people who lived scattered among their
fields, with enough space for some
privacy and quiet, were now to be moved
into a village in which the eaves of the
houses overlapped. But the newhouses
weren't even ready. If you didn't bribe
the committee, they would burn your old
house before you had taken all your
possessions out.
People are normally on the move in
much of Ethiopia: nomads in search of
grazing, seasonal labourers following the
harvests, or traders travelling to market.
^ ^ r o s s i n g a pass in an icy
^^wind near Akesta in
Wollo, six men are trans-
porting big water pots on the
backs of donkeys. The legs of
one exhausted donkey
buckle, and five jars strapped
on its back topple and fall to
the ground. One of the pots
breaks. The men, some of
them recently returned from
resettlement areas, are taking
them from Were Ilu, a nearby
district blessed with good red
pot-making earth, to sell in
their villages just west of
Dessie. A little petty trading
is a lot of hard work. The after five years in a
profit on each jar will be resettlement zone. He recalls
about 50 pence. Three days' the day in 1986 when officials
walk and sleeping rough for came to his house and told
a total profit of 2.00. Ayalew him he had to move to
Yimer takes his pots off the Metekel, hundreds of kilo-
donkey's back and puts them metres to the west. When he
on his head. 'Look at the life refused, the party activists
we lead/ murmurs one of his returned with soldiers and
companions. forced him and his family on
Ayalew, resettling again, to a bus. When they got to
this time back home in Wollo, Metekel, he recalls, 'There
is trying to augment his wasn't much there, except
income from a tiny patch of malaria'. People could not
land allocated to him by the move back to Wollo without
local Peasants' Association. the right travel documents,
He came back with his wife and so were effectively
and family to the area in 1991 imprisoned.
But Ethiopia today has so many
displaced, uprooted, and exiled
populations that the upheavals are unlike
anything previously experienced. From
the destitute shanty-towns of Addis
Ababa to the fly-blown returnee camps,
there are many families who haven't been
back to their place of origin for years,
even decades, and are still waiting for the
chance to feel once again the satisfaction
of being back home.
27
Living off the land
L and is the backbone of Ethiopia's
economy. In a country with almost no
industry, land has been the only source of
wealth for generations. There is hardly
any aspect of national life which is not
intimately related to questions of land
ownership. It is one of the most critical
political and economic issues for the
future, and the most explosive of the past.
Until 1975, land in Ethiopia was
organised on a feudal basis, with land-
lords, including the Orthodox Church,
owning almost all the land and letting it
out to peasant farmers, who had to pay a
large proportion of their harvest as rent.
The complex web of family obligation,
servitude, taxation, and feudal tribute
payments developed into an intricate
pattern of exploitation. In Wollo region,
in 1974, it was estimated that over 100
different land-tenure systems were in
place.
One of the most popular slogans of the
Ethiopian Students' Movement, which
provided some of the impetus for the
revolution of 1974, was 'Land to the
Tiller'. Only a year after the revolution,
the Land Reform of 1975 nationalised all
land, including that of the aristocracy and
the church. This was perhaps the most
popular thing the Derg ever did, and it
has been retained in the new Ethiopian
constitution of December 1994.
The problem is that cultivable land is
scarce. Land holdings are small (on
average, half a hectare per household in
the highlands), and getting smaller, as the
population increases and the soil is ever
more degraded. One and a half million
tonnes of soil are washed into the Blue
Nile and other major rivers every year. In
many areas the soil is only 35 cm deep.
Rivers, loaded with topsoil, are the colour
of milky instant coffee. More and more
28
marginal land is coming under the
plough in the overcrowded highlands,
but experiments in exploiting virgin
territory in the lowlands have had mixed
results.
Scenes from the highlands
Dawn in Ajibar, a highland village in
Wollo region, 2,700 metres high in the
tropics, and it's cold. Cocks are crowing
and the sun is only a promise behind
banks of cloud in the east. The dew is
heavy. Lammergeiers - menacing birds of
prey - swoop overhead. Above them a jet
passes on its way to Addis Ababa, 500
km to the south. A cow is being
slaughtered on the edge of town, and a
group of men stand around advising the
butcher, and feeding on the liver. Raw
meat is a delicacy in Ethiopia, and fresh
liver is a special treat.
On a steep and rocky slope above a
canyon, a man is ploughing in
preparation for the short rains. There has
been a little rain overnight and the
ground is now soft enough to plough, in
the hope of a crop of peas and beans. The
ploughman shouts hoarsely to his two
stumbling oxen, pulling a wooden
plough tipped with iron. The cracks of
his long whip echo across the gorge.
Suspicious of outsiders, he'd rather not
give his name. Other farmers walk by,
carrying ploughs on their shoulders. The
sun shines on the far side of the canyon.
There has been revolutionary change in
Ethiopia, but scenes such as these have
changed little in hundreds of years.
Two young men walk by, with the
determined long-distance gait of the
Ethiopian on the road. They are returning
home to Wollo, after a year working on a
relative's farm far away in Jimma. They
are on the fourth day of the walk from
Dessie, the regional capital. From his
labours in Jimma, one of them has
acquired a cassette radio: a meagre profit
for a year's work, but he says his family
will be pleased with the luxury, plus a
little cash he has saved.
Wegedi, another town at the end of the
road in Wollo, is linked to the rest of the
region by a finger of rock bridging a
mighty gorge. To the west is the great
curve of the Blue Nile. Asked what they
want to be when they grow up, children
in Wegedi say manager, or driver, or
doctor. Only one says he wants to be a
farmer; he expects to get just half a
hectare to plough, and half a hectare in
the highlands is half a hectare of steep,
rocky slope, which may have been
farmed continuously for 5,000 years.
The rain, when it comes, is a massive
force that takes away almost as much as it
gives. The brown water foams over the
landscape, scouring through gullies, tak-
ing the best soil with it. Hailstones batter
crops in the fields. Settling on the hill-tops,
the hail looks like a dusting of snow.
On the road
Trudging along the road are the nagadis:
the traders moving coffee, sugar, and salt
by donkey and mule train from the city to
the villages. With a herd of about 20 pack
animals, they make the trip once every
two months during the dry season, when
there is little work to do on the farm.
Most of Ethiopia's produce is traded on
four legs, not four wheels.
For truck drivers it is a bone-rattling,
teeth-jarring ride up from northern Wollo
to Makelle, the capital of Tigray. Hairpin
bends in the mountain passes slow a
food-aid convoy to walking pace. Hardly
any of Ethiopia's 20,000 km of roads have
any tarmac - and even they are full of
pot-holes. It's a severe test of truck
engineering and drivers' mettle. The
threat of nocturnal bandit-raids breaks up
the monotony of slogging up and down Deforested and
roads built by the Italian invaders in the degraded slopes in
1930s. the highlands: heavy
rains wash thousands
The great Alamata plain opens up of tonnes of soil from
below: the scene of the first widely- agricultural land
broadcast TV footage of the 1984-85 every year
29
 famine. This is perhaps the only mental
image of Ethiopia for many people in the
outside world: the towering mountains in
the background and the arena of death in
the plain. Most of the year, the Alamata
plain is green: thousands of hectares of
sorghum and maize grow there. But only
a few gnarled trees are dotted among the
fields. Children climb up them and scare
away the birds. A lone Oxfam water-tank
stands sentinel by the roadside, the only
sign of the largest feeding-camp during
the famine period.
Scenes from the lowlands
The central highlands of Ethiopia -
approximately the Abyssinia of old -
contain most of the population, but are
encircled and dwarfed in size by the
lowlands, often the areas most recently
added to the Ethiopian Empire. The
edges of Ethiopia are hot, dry, neglected,
and frequently unstable.
The landscape is dusty scrub, laced
with dry river beds, and blessed with
occasional springs and wells. A few
towns on the main roads are separated by
wide arid plains, dotted with herds of
goats and camels.
Hauled into the Ethiopian state against
their will during Menelik's reign, some
people in the peripheral areas of Ethiopia
have yet to accept the idea of belonging
to the state called Ethiopia at all.
Herders or farmers?
Keeping animals, and following the best
grazing, is the only way to live in the arid
lands of lowland Ethiopia. Governments
have tried to 'educate' the semi-nomadic
peoples into settling down and farming,
but it has been proved time and again
that the nomads know how best to eke a
living from an unforgiving environment,
and that governments have ulterior
motives. Nomads are difficult to tax or
recruit for war, and they tend to take the
law into their own hands when
provoked. Placid sedentary peoples have
always been the most useful for
governments looking for soldiers, and
raiders looking for slaves.
Cow's blood and milk are the staple
food of any society in an arid area. It's a

impossible to buy new clothes

H adji Adam, digging his
land by hand to plant
sorghum, used to be well-off:
he has made his pilgrimage to
Mecca. Now his land is reduced
to one fifth of a hectare.
'I have this small piece of
land here on this rocky hillside
to provide food for my family.
We've got another small plot in
the valley for growing qat. I sell
that in the market, and then we
have a little money to buy extra
food that we can't grow. My
older children work as daily
labourers. 1 have three sons and
nine daughters. At home we
have maize, sorghum, and
wheat to eat, which my wife
grinds. Maybe once every three
The story of or four months I can go to a
Hadji Ahmed Adam Muslim hotel to eat meat. It's
for the feast of Eid; we just have
to wash our old ones.
'Once things were better.
During Haile Selassie's time, I
had a lot of land: enough to
feed my family and live a good
life. When the Derg replaced
Haile Selassie, my land was
redistributed among the
members of the Peasant
Association. I was left with a
very small plot. I couldn't feed
us. Now, after the Derg, there's
no visible difference. The land
is getting degraded, and the
government isn't doing
anything for poor farmers. The
only difference is that now I can
talk freely; but we don't have
any more to eat.'

30
nutritious diet, and it can be sustained as
long as there is enough for the animals to
eat. In fact, if there is a drought, the cows
are too feeble to cope with the blood
letting, and they are left alone to feed as
best they can. To find enough for the
animals to graze on, boys and young men
go away from the homestead for months,
taking the animals hundreds of kilometres,
often across ethnic and political borders.
But the traditional diet has changed, as
other foods have become available. Roads
have penetrated into the remotest corners
of Ethiopia, and lowland people have
started trading animals for grain to vary
their diet, or selling animals for cash in
order to buy 'luxuries' like tea, sugar, and
exported on the hoof through Somalia Owning livestock is a
clothes. In a drought, or during an sign of wealth, but as
and loaded on to ships for export.
epidemic of cattle disease, the problems more and more land
Incense trees - gnarled dead-looking
mount up. Prices for animals drop, comes under the
bushes - are tapped to produce crystals plough, grazing land
because everyone is trying to sell before
of sticky gum, also for export. Salt, mined in the highlands is
their livestock wastes away. If there is a
in the wilderness of the Ogaden and the increasingly scarce
drought throughout a whole region,
Danakil depression, is traded over
farmers who did manage to produce
hundreds of kilometres. But perhaps the
something on their land will be able to
most tantalising aspect of the lowlands'
charge high prices for crops, and traders
wealth is natural gas in the Ogaden, and
from outside the area can make big
oil in Gambella.
profits by trucking grain in.
South-eastern Ethiopia lies on a
Ethiopia has the largest population of
geological fault-line which also passes
livestock in Africa, but it has dwindled
through the oil-producing states of
after a series of droughts all over the
Arabia. Prospectors - first Americans,
country, and especially in the south-east.
then Russians - have drilled in the region
While this gives the land a chance to
for 20 years. Finally, sufficient deposits of
recover, it threatens the security of many
natural gas have been found to justify
people. So more and more pastoralists are
commercial exploitation, and the World
growing maize, sorghum, and vegetables
Bank has invested about $150 million to
in areas which were previously used only
develop the Calub gas field. The more
for grazing. Popular myth would say that
romantic supporters of Ogadeni
nomads are too proud and set in their
independence look forward to their
ways to turn voluntarily to farming,
region becoming the Kuwait of the Horn
which they regard as a lowly occupation.
of Africa. At the moment, however, there
But there is a Somali proverb which says,
is little to show except heaps of
'When you fall down, it's only the land
machinery in the middle of nowhere.
that can support you.'
None the less, it is one reason why
Ethiopian governments have clung on to
The wealth of the desert the Somali areas through thick and thin.
Often described as a wilderness or a
desert, the lowlands produce livestock,
gums and resins, and hides and skins. A
certain type of black-headed sheep, raised
in the Ogaden and the Afar areas, is a
delicacy in the Gulf states. Livestock is
31
The environment:
a broken covenant

Stone check-dams
F orests once covered most of Ethiopia,
and even in the 1950s there was six
times more than there is now. Now only
Elsewhere, tree felling, without
replanting and without time for natural
regeneration, has left Ethiopia's skin
help to 'heal' a gully
the west of the country is well wooded. open to the elements. Only three per cent
formed by the
erosion that follows Mighty broad-leaved trees spread a solid of Ethiopia's land is now forested. In
heavy rains. Top soil forest canopy as far as the horizon. schools and offices around the country,
is trapped behind Colobus monkeys and thousands of promotional posters present pictures of
the dam, and over baboons and leopards live in the great idealised villages, where every house has
time the eroded
western forests. Near the villages, coffee a little stand of eucalyptus trees and the
land can be used
for cultivation bushes are planted beneath the shade of elders gossip under a great fig tree.
once more. other trees. The reality, however, in most of the
country, is a scarred landscape, covered
in open sores. When trees are cut down,
the loose soil is washed away down to
the bare rock, and bald patches pock the
landscape.
At the market in Axum, Tigray, child-
ren squat in front of tiny piles of wood.
One Birr (10 pence) buys about two kilos
of roots and twigs. Wood is so scarce that
armed soldiers at checkpoints on the
roads search lorries and cars for it. Camel
drivers from the lowlands, loaded with
logs, travel at night to avoid the police
and bring the wood to highland markets.

Eucalyptus is not the only

tree
The eucalyptus, known in Ethiopia as the
bahir zaf, 'the tree from overseas', was
imported from Australia during the reign
of Emperor Menelik. Ethiopian kings
travelled on campaigns with huge
retinues and, wherever they camped,
they plundered the natural environment.
By the time Menelik arrived in Addis
Ababa, he had already abandoned one
capital at Ankober, because the trees were
all used up. The only reason why Addis
Ababa survived to become today's
metropolis was that the fast-growing
eucalyptus was just about able to keep up
with the city's voracious appetite for
wood for fuel, construction, and cooking.

32
 The eucalyptus has since become a
distinctive part of the landscape. It's
useful for many things. Private farmers
grow it to sell poles for building. Some
eucalyptus plantations at the Forestry
Institute in Wondo Genet are even used
for making perfume. But the price of fast
growth is the eucalyptus' thirst for water.
It copes with drought by sucking water
away from a wide area around its trunk.
Crops rarely grow well around a
eucalyptus grove.
Tree nurseries are becoming a common
sight, as development agencies and the
government try to fix the soil and avert
complete sterility. Seedlings are planted
in rows of plastic cylinders, and are then
distributed, usually free to all comers.
The survival rate is regarded as good
when half of them survive. As many as
40 million seedlings have been planted in
Tigray in one year alone. Ethiopia's soil-
conservation programmes are among the
largest in the world. But it is a race
against time, to save the soil and plant
other varieties of tree seedling, especially
indigenous species that (unlike
eucalyptus) will provide forage for
animals.
Akeza Tirumesh
helping to build a
stone terrace on a
hillside in Tigray
Save our soils
On a bleak hillside in Tigray it's
beginning to spit with rain. Wrapped
against the morning cold in a cotton
shawl as grey as the clouds above, Akeza
Tirumesh humps rocks from one low dry-
stone wall to another a few metres down
the hillside. She and the other 15 men
and women in her team have to pile up
and repair three metres of terracing
before they can go back home to a little
warmth, and the reassurance that they
will be eligible for food distributions
from the Relief Society of Tigray (REST)
next time round.
The ground is rocky and unyielding.
Terracing is a series of miniature stone
walls following the slope of the hill like
the lines on a contour map. No crops
grow there, so why are she and most of
her village doing this seemingly futile
job? 'To get food,' says Akeza, 'and help
rebuild the country.' Akeza's three metres
this Thursday form part of 200,000 km of
terracing constructed in Tigray alone. The Left: Bark is stripped
off eucalyptus trees
walls interrupt the flow of rainwater for use as fuel. The 5-
down the hill during the rainy season, year-old trees will be
stopping it from rushing torrentially into sold in the market.
33
 Firewood on sale at
Axum market
the rivers, and carrying with it heaps of
valuable topsoil. Akeza's rations (a few
kilos of wheat a week) are provided by
REST in return for work. No work, no
food. Any highlander can appreciate the
Amharic proverb that says 'Only the
locust can eat without working.'
It's not like the old days
Wherever you travel in Ethiopia, older
people can always remember a time
when things were not so hard, despite
memories of war, famine, and oppression.
Whether it's the price of eggs, or the
quality of food, or the behaviour of the
government, nostalgia is rife. In Tigray,
up on the chilly hillside, women
remember when they were young, and
everything was plentiful: a time of butter,
milk, and honey. Far away to the south in
Wollayta, an Ethiopian nun, contem-
plating the latest drought, comments,
'The change of weather is confusing
every farmer. Before, they could plan. Up
to 1984 we always had rain in January'
Something has happened in Ethiopia.
A precarious environment has been
devastated by desperate people. Poor
farmers knew very well that they would
have to pay the price for cutting down
trees sooner or later. But the temptation to
34
sell charcoal to truck drivers along the
roads when times were hard was too
much to resist.
Unscientific it may be and not the
whole story, but many people believe
their present troubles are due to a change
in the weather. An older Somali woman
(80 years old by her own reckoning,
counting years by rainy seasons) says
that things were much better in her
parents' time: you could support yourself
with livestock rearing and farming. Now
she is carrying a young baby on her back
in the forlorn surroundings of Awbare
(Teferi Ber) camp, where she arrived
three years ago from a similar camp less
than a day's walk away. She and many
other people at Awbare have been
refugees for at least ten years.
The covenant between humankind
and nature has been broken throughout
Ethiopia. When nature has failed to
provide, humans have failed to preserve.
 Farming and herding:
the national lottery
Agriculture sophisticated. The stakes are high:
Ethiopia lives off the land. Over three- children are likely to sicken or die from
quarters of the population depend on malnutrition if parents make the wrong
agriculture for their living, and over decision. They must balance high-
three-quarters of Ethiopia's export yielding crops against drought-resistant
earnings come from agriculture and types, and quick-maturing crops against
livestock. Most peasant farmers have to slow-maturing crops. It is an art which is
eke a living for their extended family taught to the younger members of the
from a plot of land not much larger than family: boys go out ploughing with their
Wooden paddles are
a suburban English garden. Only about fathers, girls look after the chickens, and
used to winnow teff,
13 per cent of the land area can be used all learn to watch the warning signs in Ethiopia's indigenous
for crop production. The rest is forest, nature from an early age. staple grain
mountain, savannah, and pasture land.
Farming in Ethiopia is rather like
playing roulette or the stock exchange.
The rains, on which most people have to
depend for their crops or livestock, often
come too little or late - or sometimes too
heavily. Only one per cent of land is
irrigated. Farmers' only insurance is to
hedge their bets by planting a variety of
different crops that mature at different
times, and to keep some seed in reserve
to sow when the first attempts become
dried up or waterlogged.
On the highlands and central plateaux,
teff, barley, wheat, maize, beans, peas,
and lentils are grown. At intermediate
altitudes, farmers grow sorghum and
millet. Teff (eragrostis tef) is the most
valued food crop in Ethiopia, but you
have to plough the land eight or nine
times before planting it - and as many as
one third of the subsistence farmers own
no traction animals. In the southern
highlands the 'false banana' tree (enset) is
the main staple crop, with tubers,
vegetables, and grains as secondary
crops. Livestock husbandry, common as a
subsidiary activity in all regions, is
almost exclusively the only source of
food production in the nomadic and
semi-nomadic pastoralist lowland areas.
Farmers' survival strategies are highly
35
 T he pungent smells of frankincense
and roasted coffee beans fill the room.
A basket of popcorn or some injem (the
national food, resembling a giant
pancake) is passed around. The coffee
ceremony is under way. Almost every
day, a social ritual which transcends
ethnic differences is played out all over
Ethiopia. The family gathers and invites
friends, relatives, or neighbours. All perch
on stools while a woman - always a
woman - heats water, sorts and roasts the
A jebena is the
traditional clay-fired green beans, and then pounds the roasted
coffee pot, used for Stimulants to the beans in a pestle and mortar. As they
the coffee ceremony economy: coffee... wait, people talk and work: spinning,
basket weaving, and sewing often get
done during the coffee ceremony.
Ethiopians claim that coffee originated
in their country. (The Yemenis make the
same claim.) There is a coffee-growing
region called Kafa, which, according to
the legend, gave coffee its name. About
three-quarters of coffee grown in Ethiopia
are consumed in the country. People brew
up three times a day in the areas where it
is grown.
"You have to work underneath it to get
a good harvest,' says Gedi Turku,
working in his plantation near Gazer in
south-western Ethiopia. He has 100 or so
trees, which produce a couple of sacks of
coffee beans in a season. With 12 children
and two wives to support, his cash crop is
not making him rich. Most of the crop is
sold on the local market: it's of indifferent
quality.
The fragile coffee tree has had to
support Ethiopia's foreign-exchange
needs for decades. Coffee represents
about two-thirds of the nation's export
earnings. Ethiopia is the second-biggest
producer of coffee in Africa, and the
blends from Harar are regarded as among
the best in the world. But a disease of the
trees in the Harerghe region and unstable
world prices have led many farmers to
abandon coffee-growing, in favour of the
stimulant qat.

36
 I at, chat, khat, miraa: it's all the
same. The plant, catha edulis,
loolcs like a privet hedge. Its leaves
produce a stimulant around which
much of the culture of eastern Ethiopia,
Djibouti, Yemen, and Somalia revolves.
First mentioned in the Ethiopian Royal
Chronicles of the thirteenth century, it
has a long lineage.
Consuming qat involves picking the
young leaves and chewing them
slowly in the corner of your mouth.
Eventually the leaves disintegrate and
the juices penetrate into the
bloodstream. A mild amphetamine, it
keeps you awake and rather jittery for
hours, if you chew enough. Soft drinks,
sugar, and sweet tea are offered during
a qat session to help wash down the
bitter taste. The leaves of qat are
Qat is grown in highland areas,
and qat chewed for their
where it is often the dominant cash stimulant properties
crop. The market is lucrative, since
much of the crop goes for export, to part of the export economy. The qat
Djibouti and Somalia, generating Exporters' Association fills up
valuable foreign exchange. In the Ethiopian Airlines jets at Dire Dawa
highlands around Harar, qat grows in airport every day for export to
orderly rows for valley after valley. Djibouti, and is a major economic force
Qat is popular with long-distance in the eastern region. The exchange
truck drivers and short-distance taxi rate between the Ethiopian Birr and the
drivers; a local joke says that it's not Somali shilling can fluctuate wildly
the qat which makes their driving when deliveries of qat arrive in a
erratic, it's the connoisseur's remote town.
examination of every leaf which takes Farmers have increasingly turned to
the driver's eyes off the road. qat as a relatively reliable, high-profit
As with coffee, qat has its own crop, which is often intercropped with
ceremonies. In Somali areas, the men vegetables like sweet potato. Prices for
will gather in the heat of the afternoon qat vary widely, according to the
on matting in the shade, and drink tea season. A good bunch can cost 80 Birr
and chew over the burning issues of in the dry season, but only 10-20 in the
the day. Incense is burnt and cheap wet season. Those who can irrigate
perfume is passed around to stimulate their qat get rich. But when there is a
the senses. drought, the qat growers suffer as
Some qat addicts end up as much as the producers of other crops.
desperate beggars in the cities. Because 'Our bellies are like an empty road,'
it suppresses the appetite, qat is says one qat farmer. 'No one knows
chewed by people who do not have what happened to the rain - except
enough to eat. But the crop is a critical God.'

37
 Livestock
Ethiopia has the largest livestock
population in Africa. About 40 per cent of
agricultural production is made up of
animal produce: meat, dairy products,
and skins. Nearly every family, if they can
afford it, will keep a few animals. Owner-
ship and management of cattle and
camels has often evolved into a form of
social organisation in nomadic areas.
Oxen for ploughing are a critical resource
in the highlands. Sheep are kept in the
mountains for wool and everywhere are
reared for meat. Chickens and eggs are
reared for market, or for eating as a deli-
cacy at holiday times. Dairy products are
an important part of children's diet, and
tending smaller animals provides some
women with their own small income.
Most of the camels in the world are in
the Horn of Africa. About a million are in
Ethiopia. Somalis and Afars alike keep
camels for every purpose: as transport for
their portable houses, for milk, for meat,
and for insurance in times of war or
drought. Camels are the glory of the
Ogaden desert. Proverbs are written
about them, blood feuds are settled by
payment with them, and celebrations are
enjoyed with their meat.
Owning oxen is one of the key dis-
tinctions between rich and poor in the
As many as one third
of farmers in Ethiopia
own no traction
animals for ploughing
38
highland farming areas. At least one third
of farmers don't own even one ox. The ox
is needed to pull the plough, which
breaks up the soil, mixes up the moisture
and the nutrients, and gives the tiny
seeds of teffa chance. If you have one ox,
you may be able to come to an
arrangement with another farmer in the
same position. If you have none, you
borrow the ox for ploughing, but the
owner will claim a portion - perhaps half
- of your crop.
Goats, said Gandhi, are 'the poor
man's cow'. Hardy but tasty, they are
often tended by women and children in
Ethiopia. There are about 15 different var-
ieties in the country, and new breeds,
mixed with the biggest and hardiest of
the locals, are making a big contribution
to some families' incomes. Abdurazak
Mohammed, from the eastern Harerghe
region, says 'It's like having something in
hand, just in case you have an unexpect-
ed problem.' A goat can produce as much
milk as a cow, if fed properly.
Traditionally, goats have been left to
fend for themselves, but the state of the
environment in Ethiopia is such that
owners have to grow and collect greenery
and forage for their animals: the land
can't provide enough browse naturally.
 Can Ethiopia
feed itself?

W hen a guest is welcomed in an

Ethiopian home, whether it is in
the mountains or the desert, the custom is
designed to provide. The daily per capita
calorie supply is the lowest in Africa, just
71 per cent of requirements.
to offer everything possible, however Meat is a rare luxury, and eating three
poor the home. Coffee cups are filled to times a day is the exception, not the rule.
overflowing, and any less than three This is not a cultural matter, although
rounds would be considered rude. The fasting plays a major role in the lives of Take-away food:
generosity of Ethiopians is sometimes both Orthodox and Muslim Ethiopians. It injera for sale at
hard to believe. But more than half of the is a matter of permanent hunger. Nearly Jinka market
population are undernourished all the
time.
Food unites Ethiopia like nothing else.
There are few things that are found all
over Ethiopia, but one of them is injera,
the national food. Made from a variety of
grains, with different sauces, the huge
pancakes (as big as car tyres) are
everywhere: red and crunchy injera made
from sorghum in Humera on the north-
west tip of Ethiopia; sticky grey and
white versions made with maize in the
Somali south-east; and everywhere the
sour brown version made from teff, a tiny
grain grown only in Ethiopia (and, in
small quantities for homesick exiles, in
North America). Rich in iron and high in
gluten, teff is both the food on which the
nation marches, and a key economic
barometer. At one point during the war
in Eritrea, the terms of barter were
between sacks of teff'and small Fiat cars,
useless because of the lack of fuel. Teff is
the most valued food crop in Ethiopia,
and the agricultural cycle of its
production is rooted deep in the
country's culture.

Counting the calories

People eat little and not very often in
Ethiopia. The average daily calorie intake
is about 1,621 calories, about half that of
North Americans (who eat on average
138 per cent of their actual requirements)
and less than a standard relief ration is

39
 two-thirds of those children who manage
to survive their first five years are
physically stunted, and their mental
development is inhibited by
malnourishment.
The food 'emergencies' that frequently
swallow up large amounts of food aid in
Ethiopia occur with regularity because
the normal state of the nation's belly is
half-empty. It doesn't take much to tip
the balance from underfeeding to famine.
Easily-treated problems caused by
vitamin deficiencies, such as goitre and
night blindness, are also common.
More mouths to feed
Ethiopia can nearly feed itself: it even
produced 80 per cent of its food in the
famine years of 1984-85. Statistically, the
gap between needs and production is
small, but in human terms it is a margin
of misery and death. Closing the gap is
possible, if only the population remains
static. But it has already quadrupled since
1900 and, with a current total of around
54 million people, Ethiopia is the second-
most populous nation in Africa after
Nigeria. The remorseless arithmetic of an
annual growth rate of 2.9 per cent means
that in 25 years the population may have
doubled.
More than half of all Ethiopians are
under sixteen. On average, 7,000 children
are born in Ethiopia every day, of whom
one in five will die before his or her fifth
birthday. Life-expectancy at birth is only
46 years, while family planning is used
by only two per cent of couples, mainly
in urban areas.
Progress has been made since 1960,
however, when an Ethiopian could
expect to live only until the age of 36, and
under-five mortality was close to one
third of all births. The natural resources
of Ethiopia could support a larger
population, but economic development
will have to be dramatic to catch up with
the demands of the population.
The problem that stares farmers and
economic planners in the face is that
weather patterns are becoming
increasingly unpredictable, and pressure
40
on the land from over-grazing and
incessant cultivation has reduced soil
fertility in many areas. Per capita food
production has been declining by about
two per cent a year. If this trend
continues, people will go hungrier and
hungrier; or food imports will have to
grow by about ten per cent every year,
just to keep the Ethiopians at their
present inadequate level of nutrition.
Even the most optimistic forecasts for
Ethiopia's food production predict a
perennial shortfall of at least half a
million tons every year for the next
twenty years. In today's money,
importing that amount of food and
delivering it where it is needed costs
about $200 million each year: more than
Ethiopia ever earned from coffee exports.
Food aid
There is a joke circulating in Ethiopia,
probably coined by a cynical aid worker:
'When there's a drought, we pray for rain
in Canada.' Canada, the USA, and the
European Union have provided huge
quantities of food aid over the last
decade. Since 1985, well over half a
million tons of food have been delivered
to Ethiopia every year. In the next five
years, imports will probably need to rise
to one million tons a year to keep
Ethiopia on an even keel.
But imported wheat, which makes up
most of Ethiopia's food aid, is not to local
people's taste. Most highlanders would
prefer teff, the staple grain which grows
in only very small quantities outside
Ethiopia; lowlanders are more
accustomed to maize. Locally-made
butter {kibe) is part of the distinctive
flavour of Ethiopian ivat sauces, and
imported edible oil is no substitute.
The paraphernalia of food aid has
developed into a market all of its own:
the tin cans, plastic jerry cans, barrels,
and sacks of imported food are now
ubiquitous all over the country. When the
US military donated millions of army
rations left over from the Gulf War, the
brown plastic wrapping was made into
hats, bags, school satchels, and shoes.

Donated oil containers make tea kettles,
and USAID bags, emblazoned 'Not to Be
Sold or Exchanged', are furiously traded
in Dire Dawa to carry locally produced
food.
Food aid is calculated in a methodical
way. Its scientists are nutritionists,
agronomists, and logisticians. In order to
determine Ethiopia's food-aid needs, a
notional number of kilos is decided as the
average annual consumption per head.
This, multiplied by the number of needy
people, becomes the food requirement.
Then the harvest is estimated, and the
difference becomes the basis of an appeal
to international donors. In famines,
children are weighed and their height
measured against global standards
devised in the USA decades ago. If over
20 per cent of children fall below 80 per
cent of normal, a 'nutritional emergency'
can be declared.
But this systematic calculation of need
is followed by a haphazard system of
distribution. Any of about 100 voluntary
agencies may undertake to distribute
food; when deliveries falter, rations often
Drought-cracked soil
and food-aid
packages: reminders
of Ethiopia's
vulnerability to food
shortages
differ widely from place to place. Some
food is given in return for work, some is
not; some is given as a balanced food
basket - grains, oil, and pulses - but
elsewhere people receive just grains.
None of this indicates mismanagement:
feeding millions of people in Ethiopian
circumstances is a logistical nightmare;
but it does make it almost impossible to
trace the impact of food aid.
There is no doubt that Ethiopia needs
help with food. And the European Union
and North America usually have stocks
to spare. Very roughly, it costs less than
10.00 a month to save an Ethiopian from
starvation. The real debate is not about
the cost of food aid, but about whether it
will be a permanent feature of the
Ethiopian economy. It is hard to imagine
that there will be enough money and
goodwill among the donor countries to
develop long-term solutions that really
work, and gradually enable a few more
people to become self-sufficient in food
every year - when just keeping the
country on its knees is costing billions.
41
The world's second-
poorest economy
Too poor to buy money
Ethiopia can't afford new banknotes as
often as richer countries, and every note
is passed around until it has the
consistency of tissue paper encrusted
with grease. Sometimes stapled together,
Gebremeskal Gebre
damaged notes are hard to get rid of in
Aregawi earns his
living making sandals areas far from a bank, and forgeries are
from used car tyres not uncommon. The currency, the
42
Ethiopian Birr, is in tatters, both
physically and economically.
Ethiopia has embarked on a Structural
Adjustment Programme which is meant
to stimulate economic growth and benefit
the agricultural sector. Relaxation of the
rigid economic policies of the Derg era
has encouraged farmers to plant more,
and traders' business is expanding. But
despite superficial signs of economic life,
urban unemployment is rampant, and
the ranks of the poor grow larger all the
time.
Ethiopia was often called 'the poorest
country in the world', ranking last in the
World Bank's statistics of gross national
product (GNP) per head. The miserable
honour now belongs to Mozambique,
and Ethiopia is 'only' the second-poorest
nation. Switzerland is the richest country
in the world by this indicator, with an
annual GNP per capita of $33,610,
compared with Ethiopia's $120. UNICEF
estimates that about 62 per cent of the
population live below the absolute
poverty level, which means they are
unable to afford an adequate diet and
other basic necessities.
An economy addicted to
coffee
Agriculture is the foundation of the
Ethiopian economy. To pay for imports of
petroleum and machinery, the country
exports hides and skins, oil-seeds, and
pulses. But coffee is the main export item,
generating 60 per cent of Ethiopia's
foreign-exchange earnings. This is a
dangerous dependency: when coffee
prices drop on international markets,
Ethiopia loses millions of dollars in
revenue. The coffee-producing countries
used to be organised into a cartel, to try
to maintain higher prices by holding back

excess produce from the market. But
when competitive pressure forced the
agreement to collapse in 1989, the
resulting free-for-all meant that
consumers in rich countries enjoyed the
cheapest coffee in years. Coffee prices hit
rock bottom in 1993; in 1994 they shot up
after the Brazilian harvest failed - only to
fall again by the end of the year. At best,
coffee-production offers only a precarious
living. If a health scare in the USA and
Europe were to lead to a drop in coffee
consumption, the Ethiopian economy
would be ruined.
Ethiopia's trade deficit, US$822 million
in 1992 on a balance-of-payments basis,
reflects the fact that international terms of
trade have successively moved against
the country since 1970. Ethiopia must
find alternatives to the export of
agricultural products on which it has
always relied. The exploitation of mineral
resources offers some hope of eventually
reducing the nation's trade deficit. In the
south-west, at Kenticha, a significant
deposit of tantalite, a mineral used in the
electrical components industry, has been
identified for mining. Exploration is in
progress to locate natural gas and oil
fields in the Ogaden, and an oil concess-
ion has been granted in the Afar region.
Pepsi Cola factory,
Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia cannot rely
on exporting primary
commodities; it must
develop a broader
manufacturing base.
Ethiopians have been getting poorer
for the last 25 years. Growth in gross
domestic product has averaged 1.5 per
cent each year: not enough to keep up
with the high rates of population growth.
The civil war consumed up to half of the
government's budget at its height. The
black-market exchange rate rose until it
was three times the official rate, and
public-service wages were frozen. Out of
its meagre resources, Ethiopia paid
nearly $100 million in interest alone on
debt in the financial year 1991/92.
Arrears have accumulated, because debt-
servicing obligations were not met. In
1991 the Transitional Government
inherited an economy on its knees. The
next year, the total external debt was 66
per cent of the country's gross national
product, and the debt-service ratio was
14 per cent of export earnings.
Although the bulk of Ethiopia's long-
term debt is owed to bilateral creditors,
half of this is owed to former Eastern Bloc
allies of the Mengistu regime. The largest
single creditor is the former USSR.
Repayment of the rouble debt accrued for
the purchase of arms during the civil war
is repugnant to Ethiopians.
Cancellations of external debt are
critical for the recovery of Ethiopia's
43
 1994/95. This policy was well received by
donors, and has produced pledges of
over $1 billion of new aid money. The
reform programme foresees growth of 5.5
per cent over the next few years. '
The economic reforms will hit some
people hard. Redundancies in the public
sector and privatised industries, and
anticipated inflation due to lack of
control over producer prices, will
increase urban poverty. Some of the
options to catch these poor people in a
safety net include public-sector wage
rises (the first was simultaneous with the
devaluation of the Birr in October 1992);
severance pay and retraining for sacked
government workers; and food and
kerosene vouchers and labour-based
public works to help the urban poor.
As such, Ethiopia's Structural
Adjustment Programme is fairly typical
of the kind of policy which the World
Bank and IMF have recommended for
many poor countries. It has begun
without dramatic increases in costs for
public services like education and health,
which are often the bitterest pill to
swallow. But neither has it produced
anything tangible to help the poor, other
than the faint hope of a 'trickle-down'
effect. There is a long way for a very little
money to trickle down in Ethiopia, and a
special poverty-alleviation package was
discussed at great length at the start of
the economic reforms, in order to tackle
Trading home-grown economy, so that the foundations can be the problem more directly. So far, nothing
cotton in Axum. laid for its sustained growth. Ethiopia's has been decided. Ethiopians may have
Ethiopia's internal
bilateral creditors in the Paris Club to wait a long time before they see any
market has begun to
expand since the end agreed to cancel half their debt at the end benefits from the Structural Adjustment
of the civil war, of 1992, with the balance rescheduled Programme.
but the country needs over 25 years. But it is the multilateral
to earn creditors, principally the World Bank,
foreign exchange
which have the power to make the most
with a strong and
sustainable
significant concessions on debt-relief.
export trade. Their goodwill depends on Ethiopia's
commitment to economic reform and a
structural adjustment programme.

Economic reform
A Policy Framework Paper, devised by
the government with the IMF and World
Bank, presented an economic plan up to
44

A school with no desks
At the Obelisk School in Axum, 854
students attend in two shifts, morning
and afternoon. Many children, from the
age of 6 upwards, come from 10 km
away. The school is not unusual by
Ethiopian standards: it has no desks, no
chairs, and not even a football. There is
no water tap and no toilet. Perched on
little heaps of stones for four hours under
a canopy of dried branches, the children
are learning mathematics. Visitors are
greeted with a loud 'Good morning,
Teacher' and a few giggles. The school
director, Tekle Gebre Egziabher, sits in a
small room, floored with red earth, and
roofed with corrugated iron. 'We have no
budget,' he explains, 'to buy a football or
volleyball.' Two posts in the dusty field
behind the tiny buildings might once
have had a net strung between them, a
long time ago. The only source of cash for
the school is the fee of 50 pence a year
Education: a way
out of poverty?
paid by each student. The central
government pays the teachers' salaries,
but everything else has to come from the
parents - who have little to spare.
Nationally, only about 22 per cent of
children are enrolled in primary school,
and only about 10 per cent make it to
secondary school. These rates are among
the lowest in Africa. The UN Develop-
ment Programme estimates that the
average member of the workforce in
Ethiopia has only one year of schooling.
Despite major campaigns during the
Mengistu years, only about half of
Ethiopians can read and write.
Many schools work on a shift system,
opening three times a day to handle the
overwhelming number of students.
Classes of 100 pupils are not uncommon.
When high schools break for lunch in
Addis Ababa, traffic grinds to a halt, and
hundreds of children spill on to the
streets.
An elementary school
in Tigray: no desks,
chairs, water, or
toilets. 843 pupils
walk up to 10 km to
get there.
45
 An alphabet with 256
letters
Progress in education in Ethiopia is not
simply a question of increased enrol-
ments. The curriculum has been radically
revised. In the past, all schools in
Ethiopia taught and tested in Amharic.
(The universities used English.) Children
who spoke other languages had to learn
Amharic before being able to understand
anything at school. It was a major hurdle
to overcome: learning a foreign language,
with its 256-letter alphabet and ferocious-
ly difficult grammar, made academic
progress hard. As part of the regional
decentralisation policy, new curricula and
school books have been drawn up, and
children can now be educated in their
mother tongue in over a dozen Ethiopian
languages. Most of the languages are
written with the Latin alphabet.
So many adults have had their
education disrupted by the war that it is
common to see grown-ups sitting at the
back of the class in primary schools. The
fighters of the EPRDF are also catching
up with their education, and groups of
them walk back from classes, satchel in
one hand, Kalashnikov in the other.

XHHMlll. f.<CA.->A

>>

-tttr
Literacy class for If Ethiopia is to diversify its economy,
workers at Hayhaile
and be less dependent on agriculture, it
tree nursery, Tigray
will need a skilled work force to develop ifi'TA-fm- y
light industry, tourism, and other M M "He nr-
revenue-generating economic sectors. A
(\"i*CT
well-educated generation of young
-nt-i- .<:
people who can find worthwhile work
may be the best insurance against
drought for Ethiopia. Girls and boys at
present are unlikely to complete even
primary school, which leaves them only
limited 'career' options. More children in
school, especially more girls, will help to
widen the scope of the potentially
employable.

46
 Women's lives:
the 15-hour day

D espite all the rhetoric during the

Mengistu era about the noble role of
women in 'socialist Ethiopia', women
the baby unattended until the placenta is
delivered, cause extra problems. And
when things go wrong, the traditional
continue to be ignored, exploited, and midwife can only do so much. Goats are
undervalued. About 14 per cent of rural slaughtered, massage is performed, but
households in Ethiopia are headed by often it is too late. Women sometimes
women, and the figure rises to 22 per cent arrive in a hospital or clinic after 48 hours
in urban areas. Like most women all over of exhausting labour.
Kahsa Girmay
the world, rural women work at home Some estimates suggest that as many carrying her baby in a
without pay. Collecting fuel-wood and as 90 per cent of Ethiopian women are goatskin pouch
water, raising children, and working in
the fields and with livestock all add up to
a staggering burden. A woman's average
working day is 15 hours long. Men
produce about the same amount as
women, but men have far fewer tasks in
the running of the household. In paid
employment, women are under-
represented: fewer than one quarter of
government workers are women.
Only one in four girls ever goes to
school at all. Girls drop out of school
because they are needed at home to
work. And they marry young: ten per
cent of girls between 10 and 14 are
married. Women have less access to land,
labour, capital, information, credit, and
government assistance than men. Their
subordination to men in terms of money
and property was even included in the
Civil Code of 1960. Women did not win
the right to vote until 1956.

Marriage and motherhood

Each Ethiopian woman bears, on
average, five children, but nearly ten per
cent of women give birth to ten live
babies in their lifetimes. At least 10,000
women die in child-birth every year.
Almost every child is born at home, in
unhygienic conditions, with a local
untrained midwife in attendance. Some
traditional practices, like coating the
umbilical cord with cow dung or leaving

47
 circumcised. Frequently described as
'female genital mutilation', the removal
of parts of the outer sex organs is a
cultural practice common throughout the
Horn of Africa. The risk of infection from
unsterilised razor blades or knives, and
the risk of excessive bleeding, are high.
The operation is often performed on girls
when they are as old as ten, and medical
and social problems develop later in life.
Sexual intercourse can be painful and
childbirth dangerous. Infections are
common.
In many countries it has been shown
that women with more education have
fewer children, because they appreciate
that spacing children is better for the
health of the mother, and gives a child a
greater chance of surviving past the age
of five. Without education, an ideal
family size might be 'whatever God gives
us'. Most women have little control over
how many children they have, and
modern contraception services are simply
not available. Some recent studies
indicate that nearly half of Ethiopian
couples would like to be able to plan
their families, but are unable to.
Condoms are being distributed as part of
Grinding mill at
Adwa. Women value
their local community
mill, because
grinding grain by
traditional methods
at home is their
heaviest task.
48
the AIDS-control programme in their
hundreds of thousands, but few people
outside the cities use them.
New challenges for women
It would be foolish to expect traditions
which dictate women's lives to be broken
in the space of a generation or two,
whatever the government's stated
development priorities. Domestic
violence and rape are rarely even
discussed in public. However, some of
the dislocations in the recent history of
the Horn of Africa have produced
opportunities for women as an
unexpected benefit. Some refugee
women, for example, have found more
responsibility and respect in camp life
than in their previous nomadic existence.
But many others have fallen prey to
rapists in the same camps. Women were
fighters and even tank-commanders in
the civil war, but find themselves
unemployed in peace time. Many have
been widowed. But the break-up of
families by war and poverty has created
more women-headed households with
some degree of recognition in the
community.

W alking through groves of banana,
coffee, avocado, and papaya,
women carry huge bunches of bananas to
market. In the other direction, stretchers
made of sticks and woven banana leaves
bring the sick to the clinic at the end of
the road. A mother-and-child health
session is held at the clinic once a month.
Mothers assemble under the shade of a
tree deep in the Wollayta hills and are
given some health-education talks while
they wait their turn. Christian and
traditional prayers are offered. Some
fathers come carrying children too.
Children are weighed in a red washing-
up bowl hanging from a tree.
The most common greeting in
Amharic, Ethiopia's lingua franca, is
Tenasystillin; loosely translated, it means
'May God grant you health'. The
greeting, far too often, is in vain.
Ethiopians die young: one fifth of all
children die before their fifth birthday,
and the average life expectancy is 29
years less than in the UK.
Teshona Tona has been brought by his
older brother to the clinic in Wollayta.
Aged four, he weighs only seven kilos,
and is just starting to walk. Every child
attending a clinic like this one is given a
yellow health card. It records the name
and date of birth (when known),
vaccinations, and weight. The weight
graph covers the first five years of the
child's life, and shows a gently rising
curve of normal weights for the age.
Teshona has never been charted in the
'normal' area of the graph. His growth
chart is a nearly horizontal line.
Diseases on the point of extinction in
many other countries - tuberculosis,
polio, and leprosy, for example - are still
rampant in the Ethiopian countryside.
But the greatest killer is diarrhoea.
'May God grant
you health'
Four-year-old
Teshona Tona, badly
malnourished, is
carried by his brother
to a clinic in
Wollayta. Teshona's
yellow card records
details of his history
and treatment.
Infections prey on malnourishment, and
disease makes eating almost impossible.
This is the vicious cycle of disease and
malnutrition. The ravages of a simple,
preventable disease are appalling: half a
million children die under the age of five
every year. This is only slightly less than
the number of people who died in the
famine of 1984-1985. In the UK, with a
similar population, the annual figure for
under-five mortality is 7,000.
At the clinic in the Wollayta hills, hard-
pressed health workers see a stream of
patients all morning. The most common
diseases are malnutrition, malaria,
tuberculosis, and infections of the chest
or eyes. Sister Martha keeps a little
square of paper on her desk and puts a
mark against the types of illness which
people are presenting. 'One died', she
writes: another small statistic in
Ethiopia's health records.
49

Hiwot, meaning Life, is the name of the brand
of condom being sold in Ethiopia as part of an
AIDS-prevention campaign
50
AIDS
HIV infection and AIDS have yet to take
hold in Ethiopia on the scale seen in
many African countries. Thanks to
political, geographical, and economic
isolation, Ethiopia has been to some
extent insulated from the pandemic.
While other countries count cases of HIV
infection in millions, and AIDS deaths in
hundreds of thousands, by November
1994 the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia
had recorded only 15,565 cases of full-
blown AIDS since 1986.There is, however,
no reason for complacency. Official
statistics are, as usual, likely to show only
the tip of the iceberg. Ethiopia is opening
up politically, and the slow-burn nature
of the disease means that, in some cases
emerging now, patients were infected
before any public education began in the
mid-1980s. The steep upward curve of
AIDS cases is reflecting, in miniature, the
rampage of the disease in other countries.
Addis Ababa is by far the worst-
affected place, but the disease is
spreading into the remotest countryside,
helped in particular by the
demobilisation of the Mengistu army.
There could be few more effective ways
of spreading the disease than sending
half a million soldiers back from garrison
towns to their villages. Transmission by
heterosexual intercourse is the most
common route of infection now, but some
traditional practices are likely to increase
the incidence of the disease. Circum-
cision, tattooing, and decorative
scarification are all common in Ethiopia.
Unless performed with sterile blades,
they pose an additional risk. Ethiopia's
AIDS Control Programme has launched a
'Life' brand condom which is selling in
the cities, but it would be naive to
suggest that it is widely available or
popular in the rural areas.

I ercedes cars and donkeys vie for
space on Addis Ababa's potholed
streets. What began as a temporary
encampment of Emperor Menelik and his
retinue, on the site of Oromo hot springs,
has turned into a metropolis of four
million people. Still the diplomatic centre
of Africa, hosting the Organisation of
African Unity and the UN's Economic
Commission for Africa, Addis Ababa is
also the meeting point for all of
Ethiopia's many peoples.
Barefoot shepherds lope along past
prostitutes in black leather mini-skirts;
beggars implore ambassadors for change;
Nuers from the West talk pidgin Amharic
with Somalis from the East; Orthodox
Surviving in
the city
mystics and foreign evangelists stir up
their respective congregations. Not quite
harmonious enough to be called a melt-
ing pot, Addis Ababa is a series of
villages, loosely interconnected but often
ethnically defined.
More and more people are leaving the
countryside to seek their fortune in Addis
Ababa. And the more people who arrive,
the less the city's facilities can cope.
Ethiopia has had one of the lowest rates
of urbanisation in Africa, but Addis
Ababa and other centres like Dessie, Dire Addis Ababa is the
Dawa, and Makelle have grown meeting point of old
dramatically since the end of the civil and new, town and
country. Here, goats
war. Soldiers have returned home, travel drowse outside a
and residence regulations have been garage.
51
 relaxed, and petty business is flourishing.
Sadly, the city's streets are often not
paved at all, let alone paved with gold.
As less than half the population have a
latrine, the streets are often open sewers.
Poverty and squalor are rife. Children
collect pine needles from trees over-
hanging the presidential palace to use for
cooking fires; a group of homeless people
sleep under plastic sheeting just below
Mengistu's Stalinist monument to the
revolution; and children compete with
birds of prey and dogs to scavenge
among the bins outside expatriate
apartment blocks. Many people rarely
touch cash, surviving on a system of
barter and work, in return for room and
board. The minimum wage of 100 Birr in
the cities is a legal fiction: some domestic
servants earn less than 5.00 a month.
This is not far from slavery.
In cities and villages, a form of social
security is provided by traditional
institutions such as mutual savings
groups, called ekub, which take a monthly
contribution from members and then pay
out when someone is in trouble or needs
a lump sum for a wedding, for example.
The streets of Addis
Ababa are not paved
with gold. An old
man survives by
sleeping rough and
scavenging.
52
Savings associations for funerals are
generally called eddir. These networks are
dominated by women. It has been
estimated that tens of millions of Birr
pass through the ekubs every month in
Addis Ababa.
Local churches and mosques do more
to save the poor from beggary or
prostitution - the two last-ditch options
for Ethiopian men and women - than any
other organisation. Missions and church
groups run soup kitchens, health and
sanitation programmes, small savings
and credit schemes, and construction
programmes to provide some sort of
safety net for poor neighbourhoods in the
cities. The best programmes may lend a
few hundred Birr to a family to pay for
the equipment needed to make beer or
take-away food; the loan is repaid in a
series of small instalments, then recycled
as a loan to another mini-entrepreneur.

Religious belief plays a central part in
Lthe day-to-day life of Ethiopians.
Whether in the home or in a place or
worship, God, Allah, or traditional
deities are supplicated, thanked, and held
responsible for the ups and downs of life.
Religion has played a key role in history,
and today is one of the dividing lines of
society and politics.
The most remarkable feature of
Ethiopia's religious life is the centuries-
old coexistence of three of the world's
main religions. In and around Gonder,
Ethiopian Jews, Christians, and Muslims
lived together in peace until very
recently.
The Falasha
Ethiopia's links with the pre-Christian
Holy Land are confirmed by the survival
of a 'lost tribe' of Jews, who lived in
northern Ethiopia around the city of
Gonder. Known by Ethiopians as Falasha
('strangers') and to themselves as the Bete
Israel ('house of Israel'), they lived
according to a mixture of Jewish and
Ethiopian traditions.
Numbering about 40,000 in the early
1980s, the Falasha were recognised as
Jewish by the Israeli rabbinical
authorities, although they conducted
their ceremonies in Ge'ez, the ancient
Ethiopic language. As war and famine
ravaged their region, the Falashas looked
for a way out. According to the Israeli
law of return, they had the right to Israeli
citizenship. Israel, in a shadowy deal
with dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam,
arranged the evacuation of the Falasha in
two dramatic airlifts: one from Sudan in
1985, and the other, known as 'Operation
Solomon', in the last days of the Ethiop-
ian civil war in May 1991. But the
Falashas' deliverance has been mixed.
A land of
righteousness
Arriving in Israel at the same time as
hundreds of thousands of Russian
immigrants, most of the Ethiopian Jews
have failed to find work or permanent
housing. Their clerical autonomy was
threatened when Israeli authorities
refused to recognise their spiritual
leaders, or kessim. A unique part of
Ethiopia's cultural heritage has been lost,
and the Falashas' dreams of the promised
land have been disappointed.
The Orthodox Church
The Christian heritage of Ethiopia pre-
dates that of Europe. When Europeans
were still pagan, the Christian faith was
taking root in Ethiopia. Ethiopian
Orthodoxy was founded in 341 AD, after
two Christian Syrian boys, shipwrecked
off the Red Sea coast, were brought to the
court of the Emperor of Axum.
Eventually they succeeded in converting
his successor, Emperor Ezana, to
Christianity. From there the religion
spread far and wide, encouraged by early
missionaries from Syria.
Orthodox Christianity is divided into
the Russian, Greek, Syrian, and Ethiopian
Orthodox churches. They differ from the
rest of Christianity in their use of the old
Julian religious calendar, the composition
of their scriptures (there are 81 books in
the Orthodox Bible, against 57 in the
King James version), and their rituals.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has
incorporated elements of Judaism and
even, possibly, ancient Egyptian religious
ceremonies into its Christian faith. Its
practices are arcane, complex, and almost
unfathomable to the uninitiated. It is a
severe and ascetic faith. Judaic laws on
diet and circumcision are followed
strictly. A priest in Lalibela may spend
about 12 hours a day at the church, with
53
 A priest The Church today is still strong,
displays priceless despite the confiscation of its property,
processional crosses
the politicisation of its leadership, and
at the Church of the
True Cross, Lalibela the uncomfortable encounter with
Marxist atheism during the Mengistu
regime. Even those who do not attend
church observe some of the customs of
the faith, bowing three times towards a
church, even when passing in a taxi in
Addis Ababa, and stopping priests in the
street to kiss their hands.

Islam in Ethiopia
Ethiopia's first refugees were Muslims.
While the prophet Mohammed was still
alive, some of his disciples took refuge in
Ethiopia from persecution in Arabia. As a
result, the Prophet dubbed Ethiopia 'a
land of righteousness where Allah will
give you relief from your suffering'. The
faith has grown in Ethiopia ever since, in
periods of violent conflict with Christ-
ians, interspersed with centuries of
Sunday ceremonies starting at midnight. peaceful cohabitation.
The devout pray seven times a day, and Muslims probably number as many as
fast on 180 days in the year. Hermits live Christians in today's Ethiopia; the precise
in the woods and caves around the count is a highly contentious issue. Given
monasteries. During times of persecution, Ethiopia's historical reputation as a
churches were built in the most inaccess-
ible places, on cliff-tops, islands, and
mountains. But at the height of its power,
the church amassed huge wealth: it
owned fifteen per cent of the land, and
collected rent and tax from its tenants.
Even today, the Church wields a major
influence on national politics and local
lives.
It is estimated that there are 20 million
Christians in Ethiopia. The Church itself
claims 38 million. Today the clergy
number about 200,000, scattered in 15,000
churches. A Sunday communion
ceremony (Qidasse) needs two priests and
three deacons to officiate. Much of the
church liturgy is conducted in Ge'ez, the
parent language of the Ethiopian
highlands - the Latin of Ethiopia. Even
Right: One of 87 when the sermon and other parts of the
mosques in Harar. ceremony are conducted in Amharic, the
The town is one of nation's modern lingua franca, much of
the most important the ritual is incomprehensible to the
Islamic centres in Ethiopian listener.
the world.

54
Christian redoubt, it has not been easy for
Muslims to assert themselves in the
modern state. None the less, Ethiopia has
a rich Islamic history. Harar is to
Ethiopian Islam as Axum is to the
Orthodox Church. The oldest mosque in
the Horn of Africa stands at the centre of
the walled city of Harar, founded in 1520.
The Juma'a mosque, founded by Sheik
Abadir, proved to be a magnet for the
surrounding villages, and five of the
main settlements moved into the town.
The Sheik is buried at a shrine beneath
the huge branches of an old fig tree in a
corner of the old city.
Harar grew into a powerful trading
centre, exporting slaves, ivory, coffee,
tobacco, cloth, livestock, honey, spices,
and incense. By now the city has
accumulated a total of 87 mosques and
103 shrines and is one of the most
important Islamic centres in the world. A
dusty museum holds manuscript copies
of the Koran, 800 years old, bound in
leather and exquisitely inscribed on
goatskin.
Ethiopia's Muslims are Sunni, the
largest branch of Islam. As with the
Orthodox Christians, traditional beliefs in
natural spirits have been amalgamated
into the monotheistic religion of Islam.
The relationship between the two is best
described by an Oromo proverb: 'His
mouth talks about Sheik Hussein [a place of
pilgrimage], but his hands are stretched up
to the tree.'
The old religion
Older than all the monotheistic religions
with their written scriptures are the
animist beliefs of Ethiopia's 80 ethnic
minority groups. At least a quarter of
these groups are less than 20,000 strong.
They are generally on the edges of the
country, mainly in the lowlands,
speaking an array of unique languages,
and leading their lives according to the
seasons.
The Hamer people, probably about
15,000 in number, live in the far south-
west of Ethiopia. They are a traditional
pastoralist society, rearing animals for
blood, milk, and sometimes meat, and
growing sorghum in a few rain-fed areas.
The idea of nation states and lines on the
map mean little to them. What is
important is their Hamer territory,
enclosed by a range of mountains to the
east, beyond which live the Tsemhai
people, and the Omo river, controlled by
the Geleb group to the west.
Much photographed for coffee-table
books, but rarely interviewed, traditional
peoples know their land better than any
government official or outsider. Eking a
living from the arid expanses of
Ethiopia's periphery is a skill, but young
civil servants in the government
ministries still talk of the 'backwardness'
of the 'nomads', and argue that
settlement is the way forward for them.
The traditional peoples of Ethiopia are
woven together by systems of age
groups, marital alliances, clan allegiance,
and water rights. But their way of life is
under pressure: the easy availability of
guns, the shortage of land and water, and
the threat of AIDS have all made life on
the periphery even more precarious. All
of Ethiopia's minority peoples are facing
change. Pressure on land and livestock
has meant that many, like the Hamer, are
having to cultivate and become semi-
sedentary. Most of their languages have
never been written down. Shiferew Ibeda, a
Hamer man, with his
Surha Ado, an elder of the Arbore gun. Weapons of war
people, says that life has become more are everywhere in
difficult. 'All we know is how to follow Ethiopia.
55
56
the seasons/ he says. 'If there was a
drought, we used to hunt.' But the
seasons are not reliable any more, and the
wild-life is fast disappearing. His people
now depend on rations from the
government Relief and Rehabilitation
Commission. 'It was never like this
before,' he says, echoing a theme voiced
by older people all over Ethiopia. 'You
don't even get milk from goats now.'
Turga Galsha, a greying elder of the
Hamer, welcomed the author of this book
and Jenny Matthews, the photographer,
to his hut in Deleme village. Coffee was
offered, but first a prayer: for more rain,
for the well-being of the guests. All blew
a hissing noise, symbolising the breath of
life, to close the prayer.
Regular seasons are God's respons-
ibility, and the Hamer, scraping by in
another year of drought, are fed up with
their God. 'God has gone to sleep. I've given
up begging him,' says Turga Galsha later.
But he stresses that their values remain
the same: 'There is no rich person and no
poor person among us. Even though God is
sleeping, we share everything. This is how we
are. Makers of beehives, herders of cattle, and
beginners at ploughing.'

Rastafarianism
Ethiopia is the spiritual home - if not the
geographical base - of Rastafarianism, a
religious and political movement which
began in Jamaica in the 1920s, and has
spread throughout the Caribbean, North
America, and Western Europe. Hundreds
of thousands of people of Afro-Caribbean 'dreadlocks': long braids of hair, often Above: The Bob
origin regard Ras Tafari - or the Emperor worn under caps in the Ethiopian Marley Music Shop in
Haile Selassie, as he later styled himself - Woldiya, Wollo:
national colours: red, yellow, and green.
as the Messiah and champion of the black reggae music comes
But many of them also follow strict 'home'.
race, because he was the king of the only dietary laws, and have developed a form
African country never colonised. Rasta- of religious mysticism which blends
farians, who identify with the Israelites of together African and Old Testament
the Old Testament, await their own practices.
'exodus': redemption for all people of
African descent by repatriation back to
Africa. Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah,
they believe, is not dead, and one day Opposite: A Hamer
woman making
will lead them home. The most obvious
pottery in the village
features of Rastafarian culture are their of Dimeka, south-
distinctive reggae music and their west Ethiopia

57
The re-invention
of Ethiopia

T he last few years of the twentieth

century will see the re-birth of
Ethiopia, or its return to civil war and
despair. A radical policy has been
developed to confront the problems of
ethnic division which have dogged
Ethiopia from its earliest beginnings to
the present day. The result, if all goes
well, will be a peaceful federation of
mutually-dependent states with a good
chance of developing and improving the
quality of life of their peoples.
Every ethnic group, people, or 'nation'
or 'nationality' - the translation of the
Amharic word betsowoch varies - will, in
theory, control its own affairs, in its own
language, without interference from
outsiders, in a voluntary loose federation
administered from Addis Ababa. To
avoid the possibility of civil war, every
region will even have the right to leave
the federation peacefully if it so wishes.
This ground-breaking new concept has
been described by some as a model for
Africa; others regard it as a cynical ploy
to stir up trouble among Ethiopia's ethnic
groups, and strengthen the power and
influence of any one minority ethnic
group.
Tribalism used to be a dirty word both
for African leaders and for liberal
observers of Africa. But it is becoming
more and more evident that the nation
states into which Africa was divided at
independence bear little relation to
Africans' actual sense of belonging. Many
Ethiopians' first allegiance is to their
tribe, or their ethnic group, or their
region; their country comes a poor
second.
A sense of belonging can be a force for
self-reliance. But how will the semi-
autonomous regions treat those of mixed
blood - those with a mother from Tigray

58
 'What you can't settle by peace
cannot be solved by war.'
(Somali proverb)

and a father from Oromia, for example -

or those living outside their 'homeland'?
There are millions of 'mixed' Ethiopians
who may need a 'national' identity, and a
national language. A homogeneous
'Ethiopian-ness' does exist: in the culture,
family life, and work patterns of most of
Ethiopia. It is needed by Ethiopians
themselves, as a source of pride, identity,
and national cohesion.
Opponents fear that without a sense of
national identity, supported and
encouraged by the central government,
there will be nothing left of Ethiopia in a
few years' time. The centrifugal forces of
ethnic politics may tear the country apart.
Its most vehement critics insist that
ethnic politics is a kind of apartheid.
Pessimists predict that, rather than
breaking new ground, Ethiopia is digging
its own grave.
Supporters of ethnic politics, on the
other hand, argue that this may be the
only way to ensure peace, democracy,
and justice. The risks are great, but it is
undeniable that little progress towards
reconciliation has been made with the aid
of less radical policies in Bosnia, Somalia,
and Rwanda. The Ethiopian experiment
in ethnic politics, if it succeeds, has
implications for many of the racial
disputes that are flaring up in the world
today. For the poor in Ethiopia, the price
of failure will be yet more hardship. In
the words of an African proverb, 'If the
fingers of one hand quarrel, they cannot pick
up the food.'

59
Dates and events

1930 Haile Selassie crowned Emperor of Ethiopia.
1935 Italy invades Ethiopia; six years of military
occupation follow.
1941 Italians defeated by guerrilla army and Allied
troops. Haile Selassie returns from exile.
1962 Eritrea annexed by Haile Selassie, prompting
emergence of an Eritrean rebel movement (ELF).
Start of civil war.
establishes the Provisional Government of Eritrea. In
Ethiopia, the EPRDF re-establishes order in the cities,
and disarms and disperses the defeated government
army.
July 1991 EPRDF invites opposition parties to a
national conference on peace and democracy to plan
national and regional elections; meanwhile, a
transitional government rules. Eritrea is declared free
to hold a referendum on independence.

1972-1974 Famine kills 200,000 Ethiopians. April 1993 98 per cent of Eritreans vote for
independence, which is granted.
1973 Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF)
formed, superseding ELF. May 1995 Ethiopian national elections scheduled.

1974 A group of junior army officers (subsequently Goats in Jinka market

known as 'The Derg') overthrow the ageing and
unpopular Haile Selassie. Political turmoil ensues.
1975 Rebel movement, the Tigrayan People's
Liberation Front (TPLF), emerges in Tigray province.
1977 Lieutenant Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam
emerges as undisputed leader of the Derg regime.
1977-78 Territorial dispute leads to war with
Somalia. Ethiopian victory secured with massive
support from Russian and Cuban troops. Ethiopia
enters Soviet sphere of influence.
1984-85 An estimated half-million Ethiopians die in
famine.
1986 Mengistu establishes the People's Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia, with a Marxist-Leninist
constitution.
1989 Despite forced conscription and military aid
from the USSR, the government is driven out of the
capital of Tigray province by the TPLF: a turning-
point in the 30-year civil war. The rebel coalition
EPRDF is formed (the Ethiopian People's
Revolutionary Democratic Front: TPLF plus like-
minded rebel groups from other regions).
May 1991 Mengistu flees the country before the
EPRDF enter Addis Ababa. EPLF enters Asmara and

60
Update: events in
Ethiopia since 1995
ince this book was first published in
S 1995, Ethiopia has faced many
challenges - both internal and external -
to its recovery from conflict, chaos, and
destitution.
War with Eritrea
Despite the very close historic links
between Ethiopia and its neighbour
Eritrea - links based on a shared history,
a common culture, and vital trade
relations - war broke out between the
two nations in 1998. The conflict began
as a border dispute in May of that year,
with Eritrea's occupation of the area
around Badme. It turned into a full-scale
war which cost an estimated 75,000 lives,
displaced more than one million people,
and severely damaged the economies of
both countries.
Each government has accused the
other of territorial aggression and
expansionism. The border between the
two countries, which was determined in
the early years of the twentieth century
by the Italian colonial administration,
was never demarcated physically on the
ground. So the colonial era left a legacy
of controversy which soured relations
between Eritrea and Ethiopia after
independence. However, many observers
are convinced that the border issue was
only a pretext for the conflict that broke
out in 1998. The real problem was an
economic one.
Underlying causes of the war
After the downfall of the Derg in
Ethiopia in 1991, a bilateral agreement of
friendship and co-operation with Eritrea
was intended to harmonise the two
countries' fiscal, monetary, trade, and
investment policies. Ethiopia was able
to import and export goods and services
through Eritrea's ports, while Eritrea
earned about US$ 90 million dollars
a year from the provision of services and
port duties, and exported a large
proportion of its goods and services to
Ethiopia. However, this partnership did
not last long. After a few years, the two
countries were failing to agree on
common trade and investment policies.
They each introduced separate new
investment and tariff regimes, and
independent exchange and interest rates.
In 1997, Eritrea issued a new currency,
the nakfa, without due discussion with
Ethiopia. The Eritrean government
initially assumed that the nakfa would be
exchanged at parity with the Ethiopian
birr, and that the two currencies would
be usable in both countries. However, the
Ethiopian government refused to
exchange on the basis of parity, and
insisted that all trade and services should
now be transacted in hard currency,
using a letter-of-credit system. Eritrea
rejected this proposal and accused
Ethiopia of hostile protectionism. At the
same time, Tigray (the northernmost
region of Ethiopia, which borders on
Eritrea) was developing an
industrialisation strategy very similar to
that of Eritrea. This was resented by
Eritrea, which viewed it as an attempt to
undermine its exports into Ethiopian
markets.
The human cost of the war
Whatever the causes of the war, the
human cost on both sides was
devastating. Apart from the estimated
75,000 deaths, tens of thousands of
Eritreans and Ethiopians have been
expelled from both countries - either for
reasons of State security, as the
61
 governments claim, or as acts of
retaliation. In and near to the battlefields,
nearly one million innocent civilians
have been displaced. According to the
Ethiopian government, 350,000 people
had been displaced from the contested
area of Badme and Zalanbessa by the
end of 1999. The number of displaced
Eritreans is likely to be much greater,
because the war extended deep inside
Eritrea's densely populated areas, with
the deployment of more than 400,000
soldiers, fighting with sophisticated
modern weapons. Resettlement of
displaced people is now an enormously
difficult task, and active landmines pose
a major threat to reconstruction efforts.
Many villages and towns, formerly
inhabited by thousands of people, are
now devastated beyond the possibility
War with Eritrea: of restoration. In Zalanbessa, for
400,000 soldiers,
sophisticated
instance, once a town noted for its
modern weapons ... architectural beauty, around two-thirds
75,000 people dead of the buildings have been destroyed.
and 1,000,000 made
homeless
62
The economic cost
The diversion of their resources to the
war has destroyed the efforts of the two
governments to reduce the deep and
persistent poverty which exists in both
countries. Military expenditure rose to
29 per cent of Ethiopia's public spending
during the two-year war: more than one
million dollars a day.1 The indirect costs
of the war, including the costs incurred
as a result of displacement, re-routing
the transport of exports and imports, and
replacing the assets of the victims, were
similarly severe. The international
community was reluctant to give
assistance to Ethiopia and Eritrea during
the war and denied them access to loans
or debt-cancellation facilities for more
than two years, to put pressure on them
to reach a peace agreement.
Development assistance was almost
frozen as a result.
The political cost
The mutual resentment which has
developed between the people of the
two countries is one of the most ugly
scars left by the war. Their antagonism
has been compounded by the
communications media of the two
countries, and fanned by accusations
that the two governments are seeking
to destabilise each other, by supporting
opposition movements within each
other's borders. Ethiopia has accused the
Eritrean government of giving military
and moral support to the Oromo and
Somali opposition groups inside
Ethiopia, to increase political instability
and insecurity within the country.
The war has aggravated other tensions
within Ethiopia, presenting an
opportunity for some people to reflect on
their grievances against the government,
which they perceive to be favouring
Tigreans, due to the fact that the
administration is dominated by the TPLF
(Tigrayan People's Liberation Front).
The war ended in June 2000, when the
opposing governments signed a peace
proposal sponsored by the Organisation
of African Unity. They have generally
accepted the judgement of a border-
arbitration body. A UN cartographic
team has delimited the 1000-km border
between them, which is expected to be
physically marked on the ground in
July 2003. A humanitarian commission
established to settle the issues of
compensation and other consequences
of the war is expected to publish its
findings in 2003. But the two govern-
ments are still in dispute about the status
of Badme, and at present the level of
resentment and hostility between them
is so great that any attempt to normalise
relations between them will be fraught
with problems.
The impact on relations with
other countries in the Horn
The war between Ethiopia and Eritrea
has brought about changes in political
alliances in the Horn of Africa.
Somalia
Current relations between the Ethiopian
government and the new interim
government of Somalia, led by President
Abdiqassim Salad Hassan, reflect the
history of the relationship between the
two countries, which has been
characterised by suspicion, conflict,
and war. Ethiopia has been reluctant to
give official recognition to the new
government of Somalia, which took
power after Djibouti-hosted peace talks
in August 2000. It accuses Somalia of
supporting extremist elements, some of
which are believed to have links with
Islamic fundamentalists and are
perceived by Ethiopia as posing a major
threat to her national stability. Somalia
is also accused of seeking to destabilise
Ethiopia by giving support and arms to
the Oromo Liberation Front. In return,
the Somali interim government alleges
that Ethiopia maintains a military
presence and political interference in
Somalia. Ethiopia denies all the
allegations. Whatever the truth of the
matter, relations between Somalia and
Ethiopia are crucial to national and
regional security and stability.
Sudan
A few years ago, there were no
diplomatic relations between Ethiopia
and Sudan, because the former accused
the latter of direct involvement in an
attempt in 1994 to assassinate the
Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak.
Sudan was also accused of exporting
Islamic extremism and supporting
Al-litthad, a Muslim fundamentalist
group in Somalia which is suspected of
having links with the terrorist
organisation al-Qaeda. But the war
with Eritrea has changed the political
dynamics of the region and, at least for
the present, the hostilities between
Sudan and Ethiopia are over. The two
governments are accelerating the
normalisation process by strengthening
their diplomatic links and economic
co-operation. Sudan Airline has resumed
63
North Wollo: 1700 its weekly flight to Addis Ababa, and
metres above sea- Sudan has offered Ethiopia the use of
level, in a landlocked
country where
facilities in Port Sudan, although the
transport routes are infrastructure there is poor, and the
tortuous, and ports - distance from Ethiopia is great.
whether in Eritrea, The majority of Ethiopia's imports and
Djibouti, or Sudan -
are a very long way
exports are still handled by the port of
off. Djibouti, despite complaints of poor
management and high tariffs there.
Economic development
In 1993, Ethiopia adopted an economic
strategy which aimed to increase
agricultural productivity, in order to
improve food security in the towns and
raise the incomes of the smallholder
farming population. It also aimed to
improve agricultural export earnings
and generate income which could be
invested in other sectors of the economy.
The World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund supported Ethiopia's
Economic Reform Programme, which
was designed to transform the
centralised, nationalised economy into
a market-led, privatised system.
64
Large loans from the international
community were conditional upon the
implementation of a Structural
Adjustment Programme which at first
seemed to achieve a quick recovery,
with a high rate of growth in the gross
domestic product (GDP), and stable
prices and exchange rates.
In 1997, however, relations between
the government of Ethiopia and the IMF
deteriorated. The IMF suspended the
concessional loan arrangement
negotiated under its Enhanced Structural
Adjustment Facility (ESAF), on the
grounds that Ethiopia had failed to meet
some of the conditions which were
supposed to reform the financial sector.
The IMF's conditions included market-
determined rates of interest and
exchange; deregulation of fertiliser
prices; privatisation of government-
owned enterprises; and higher charges
for water and electricity. The government
negotiated a new agreement in 1998, but
in 1999 the IMF declined to extend
Ethiopia's access to the second-year
concessional fund. This time it gave
the reason as the war between Ethiopia
and Eritrea. Meanwhile, Ethiopia's
access to debt relief under the HIPC
(Highly Indebted Poor Countries)
initiative was also delayed on the
same grounds.
In 2002, the IMF was satisfied with
Ethiopia's economic performance, and
agreed that the country should have
access to a loan of US$ 14 million under
the Poverty Reduction Growth Facility
programme. So far, Ethiopia has used
US$ 77m of the US$ 133m allocated by
IMF for its economic reform programme.
On the whole, Ethiopia has achieved
relative macro-economic stability. GDP
growth has remained strong, at an
estimated 5 per cent in 2001 / 02, while
inflation is estimated to have fallen from
11 per cent between 1992 and 1995, to
zero in 2000.2 However, Ethiopia's
economic growth is far from being
sufficient to pay for significant
improvements to basic social services
and effective measures to reduce poverty.
Ethiopia remains one of the poorest
countries in the world, according to the
UN's Human Development Index.
The challenge of HIV/AIDS
Until very recently, political commitment
to deal with the onslaught of AIDS in
Ethiopia did not measure up to the
extent of the problem. The first evidence
of HIV infection was found in 1984, and
the first case of AIDS was reported in
1987. The Ministry of Health estimates
that so far 1.2 million Ethiopians have
died of AIDS-related illness. Government
figures suggest that 2.7 million are
currently living with HIV, although
experts believe that the actual number
could be as much as three to five
million.3 Heterosexual transmission is
the primary mode by which the disease
spreads. Between 10 and 18 per cent of
adolescents are estimated to be HIV-
positive.4 Girls typically contract the
virus at an earlier age than boys, as a
consequence of cultural practices such as
early marriage.
The disease is a major threat to the Schoolchildren watch
economic survival of Ethiopia. The fact a puppet show about
that HIV attacks young adults who are at HIV/AIDS, performed
by a touring group of
the peak of their productive potential has young volunteers.
many grave implications for families, for
communities, and for the whole country.
The Central Statistics Authority has
estimated that life expectancy may fall
from 55 to 42 as a result of AIDS. Many
elderly people who themselves need care
are having to support their children who
are sick with AIDS, and their orphaned
grandchildren: an estimated 1,000,000
children have lost their parents as a
result of HIV/AIDS. 5 Absenteeism from
offices, farms, and factories due to
sickness is now a serious problem which
affects many households, and severely
damages the national economy. The need
to provide care for AIDS patients has
serious implications for the national
health budget. Currently up to 42 per
cent of hospital beds are estimated to be
occupied by AIDS patients, according to
the Ministry of Health.
The government has established a
national HIV/AIDS Council, with a
secretariat and members drawn from
various sections of society. To signal the
government's political commitment to
tackling the problem, the Council is
chaired by the President of Ethiopia
himself. Government departments and
NGOs are working at both community
and national levels, basing their activities
on the comprehensive national five-year
65
 Strategic Plan. They operate prevention
programmes which promote behavioural
change and raise public awareness;
through advocacy and education they
campaign against stigma and
discrimination; and they provide HIV
testing and counselling, and safe blood
supplies.
Despite all these efforts, there remains
a deep-rooted social stigma attached to
the disease. Most of the people infected,
and their affected families, feel obliged
to remain silent about the problem -
which drives it further underground.
Prevention efforts are made more
difficult by traditional and religious
attitudes to the use of condoms; by the
powerlessness of the majority of girls
and women to negotiate safer sex, in a
context where they have almost no
economic alternative to marriage; by the
grinding poverty that compromises the
ability of HIV/ AIDS patients to live
healthily, let alone afford treatment;
and by the prevalence of opportunistic
Ogaden, 2000: diseases such as malaria and
'We used to have tuberculosis, which attack people with
200 sheep and depressed immunity.
40 cows before the
drought. We have
just 10 sheep left. Agriculture and food security
My husband doesn't Agriculture generates around 50 per cent
have any work, so he of the GDP of Ethiopia, and around
cuts wood to sell,
and we use the
85 per cent of export earnings. Eighty-
money for food.' five per cent of the population earn their
66
livelihoods through subsistence farming,
based on rain-fed food production on
smallholdings whose average area is
only one hectare. Coffee is the major
export crop, constituting one-third of
the country's export earnings.
Insecure supply of food is one of
Ethiopia's most persistent structural
economic problems. It is attributed to a
number of daunting factors, including
erratic and insufficient rainfalls; high
population growth; the fragmentation
and degradation of land; the prevalence
of pests and diseases; high prices of
agricultural inputs; limited access to
credit; and improper land management,
inadequate farming techniques, and
inappropriate policy decisions.
A number of policy measures to boost
food security and reduce vulnerability
have been adopted by the current
government, ranging from establishing
a national Early Warning System to
detect signs of famine, and improving
the provision of agricultural extension
services, to implementing emergency-
preparedness measures. Some of these
systems, including the early warning
system, have been praised by many
commentators as very effective.
As this edition goes to press (May
2003), Ethiopia has once again been hit
by a major drought. Fourteen million
people are at risk of serious food
shortages, three times as many as in the
terrible famine of 1984-85.6 Much of the
population is living in a state of constant
vulnerability, and there are signs that
people are unable to cope with the
situation. There are reports of large
numbers of cattle dying in the Amhara
and Somali regions, with up to 15 per
cent of the population suffering from
malnutrition in some areas. People's
apparently endless resilience in coping
with recurrent droughts and hunger is
coming under acute strain: repeated
poor harvests and the high prevalence of
poverty and disease have depleted their
resources to dangerous levels.
The impact of AIDS means that this
state of affairs can only get worse.
Experience in Southern Africa shows that uneven patterns of land possession.
ill health among young adults threatens But in north Wollo zone, for instance,
the long-term food supplies of areas of land as small as a quarter of one
communities who were formerly able to hectare were allocated to newly married
keep going and weather the hard times. couples and re-settlers, and this policy
The Ethiopian government has appealed has been criticised for actually
for non-food items, including medical aggravating the fragmentation of land
supplies and water-supply tools, to the holdings, which all too often leads to
tune of US$ 76 million, but the response the degradation of the land in question.
of the international community is as yet In any case, the redistribution of land
inadequate. alone is no solution to the problem of
the lack of land to distribute: in many
Land: still a hot issue farming communities, a growing
Ethiopia has passed through various population is claiming an ever-
types of land-administration systems, decreasing amount of usable land.
linked to three different forms of political In Ethiopia, whose economy is mainly
rule: the monarchy, the socialist era, and based on agriculture, the issue of land
the current federal republic. During the distribution is obviously highly
monarchy, there was a dual system of controversial. The government argues
land tenure. In the north, where the rist that abolishing State ownership and
system was dominant, a member of a adopting the freehold system will lead Northern Wollo:
community would claim a portion of the to large-scale landlessness, because many women watering
shared agricultural land in the village by vegetables In a
of the peasants would probably be forced community garden
proving descent from the village. In the by poverty to sell their land to profiteers, which supports
south, the gult system was predominant, which would lead to their eviction and 18 families
in which land was given by the Emperor
to soldiers and civil servants as a reward
for their services. In 1975, at the start of
the socialist regime, land was proclaimed
to be the property of the State. Farmers
had the right to use the land, but all
private ownership and transactions in
land were outlawed, and the freedom to
hire labour was restricted.
After the collapse of socialism, the
Constitution of 1995 decreed that land
remained in public ownership. Although
land-policy reform has since relaxed
some of the constraints on use, the sale
and purchase of land are still prohibited.
The government's view is that any
significant changes to land policy require
not only the involvement of regional
parliaments, but also a change in the
federal constitution.
To tackle problems created by shortage
of land, redistributions took place in 1991
and 1996-97. The former measure was
intended to address the problems of
settlement-returnees and ex-soldiers,
while the latter was implemented in
Amhara region to reverse allegedly

67
 forced migration to urban areas, where
they would face a very uncertain future
of poverty and misery. Critics of the
government's policy on rural land tenure
believe that the true motive for retaining
public ownership is to keep control over
the government's constituencies. The
system has been much criticised for
giving tenants no security, and
discouraging the mobility of the rural
population, so reducing the size of
family holdings and creating further
environmental degradation.
In relation to urban areas, government
policy has been very different. A system
of leasing land in the cities permits
leaseholders to sub-let or sell the
property on the land, besides extending
their leases. The government has argued
that the urban land system provides a
marketable system of land holding,
while retaining the principle of State
ownership: in the urban areas, and
particularly in Addis Ababa, land for
investment can be acquired through
auctions, with lease periods ranging
from 30 to 99 years. However, many
commentators argue that investment is
deterred by the high costs of leasing,
with heavy down-payments required,
and by the lengthy bureaucratic
procedures involved.
Political developments
Since the first edition of this book was
published, Ethiopia has held two
national elections. The first, in 1995, put
in place a democratically elected
government after four years of rule by a
transitional administration, composed of
various groupings who had fought to
overcome the Derg regime. EPRDF, the
major political alliance, won a landslide
victory. Almost all the opposition parties
boycotted the process. EPRDF was
accused of intimidation and vote rigging.
The second election was held in May
2000, and was reported by domestic and
international observers to be a fair,
well-organised, and inclusive process.
Although the major opposition groups,
including the Ethiopian Democratic
68
Party, All Amhara People's Organisation,
the Oromo Liberation United Front, and
the Oromo National Congress, ran for
seats, 85 per cent of the House of People's
Representatives and the Federal Council
remained in the hands of the EPRDF.
In 1995, the Ethiopian federalist
structure was installed, with the aim of
devolving power to regional
administrative structures, formed in the
main on the basis of ethnicity and
language. The regional governments
have extensive economic and political
autonomy, although the federal
government has influencing power on
monetary issues, ownership of land,
regulation of foreign trade and
investment, and a nation-wide transport
policy.
The principle of basing federal and
regional administrations on ethno-
linguistic factors is a key aspect of the
political philosophy of TPLF, the
dominant party in the ruling coalition
government. This remains a hotly
debated issue. The opposition groups
argue that such ethnic federalism is a
potential threat to the Ethiopian national
identity and the nation's sense of shared
values. However, others argue that rulers
of Ethiopia have tried to build a sense of
national identity for centuries, but
without much success: most people have
remained loyal to their particular ethnic
group. Hence, they say, the new system
reflects reality. Feelings of national
identity and pride have mostly been
limited to occasions when Ethiopia as a
State has had to defend itself. (The recent
war with Eritrea is an obvious example.)
The case in favour of ethnic federalism is
that Ethiopia is a country which is rich in
ethnic diversity but suffers from unequal
distribution of power and resources
between ethnic groups. Power and
authority have in the past been
systematically centralised by successive
regimes, which have favoured one ethnic
group - the Amhara. Devolution of
power through the federal system, it is
argued, is the sole means of ensuring the
equal distribution of political power.
 Another challenge facing the
government is the internal split within
the TPLF. The Front played a crucial role,
if not a leading role, in ending the regime
of the Derg in 1991. It has also played an
influential role in developing the idea of
federalism based on ethnicity and
language, and it has influenced the
implementation of this policy. In short,
TPLF, as a major force in the EPRDF,
provides an ideological direction to the
government of EPRDF. In the past two
years, TPLF has been challenged by
internal divisions. Its leaders split into
two factions over differences in ideology,
the war with Eritrea, and the question of relations, Ethiopia is considered as a Citizens of Ethiopia
corruption within the party and the country of strategic importance in efforts are gradually gaining
the confidence to
government. There was some speculation to combat international terrorism. Hence, express their views.
that this would lead to radical political relations with countries of the West,
change in Ethiopia, because TPLF is at including the USA and the UK, seem to
the centre of Ethiopia's national political be improving, leading to a flow of
dynamic. However, this was not the case. finance into Ethiopia to support
The immediate crisis within the party development activities that focus on
seems to be over, at least for the time good governance and the strengthening
being. Some of the dissidents left of civil society. Many feel, however,
Ethiopia as refugees; others were that such international support for the
detained on charges of corruption; and existing government will ultimately
another small group apologised and entrench the power and unity of the
rejoined the party, giving the TPLF ruling party.
leadership the chance to consolidate their
ideological position in the party. Abraham Woldegiorgis
(Former Community Development Team
Prospects for democracy Leader, working for Oxfam GB in Delanta,
The prospects for democracy in Ethiopia Ethiopia)
are unsure. On the plus side, under the
current administration there has been Notes
progress towards creating a democratic 1. The World Guide 2003/2004
culture, allowing individuals to express 2. Ibid.
their political opinions through the press, 3. 'The Next Wave of HIV/AIDS:
and permitting the political activity of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, India, and
opposition groups. However, the fact China', September 2002, National
remains that there is still a great deal of
Intelligence Council-ICA 2002-04D,
political intolerance and a lack of
www.odci.gov/nic
openness among political groups.
Currently, there is an unresolved 4. Ibid.
argument between the government and 5. 'HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia', A USAID
the independent press over the proposed Brief, July 2002, www.synergyaids.com
press laws, which will regulate the 6. Economic Intelligence Unit Report,
activities of journalists and the December 2002
circulation of information. Many see this
as a signal of political intolerance of
dissent. In terms of international

69
Facts and figures

Population: 66,040,000 (2002);

annual increase: 2.9% (1985-2000)
Cities: Addis Ababa (2.5 million),
Dire Dawa (203,000), Harar (94,000)
Land area: 1,000,000 km2
Life expectancy: 43 years
Infant mortality rate: 117 per 1000
Under-five mortality 174 per 1000
rate:
Access to safe 24%
drinking water:
Literacy: male 44%, female 33%
Primary-school enrolment: male 43%, female 28%
Secondary-school enrolment: male 14%, female 10%
Human Development Index 168 (out of 173) (2002)
ranking:
GNP per capita: $668
Annual growth of economy: 3%
Public expenditure: 29% to defence, 31% to social
services (1999)
Communications: 4 telephone lines per 1000 people
Currency: Birr; 8.4 birr = US$ 1 (March 2002)
External debt: $5481 million ($87 per capita)
Debt service: 17% of exports (1999)
Value of exports: $984 million
Value of imports: $1961 million

(All figures relate to the year 2000, unless otherwise specified. Sources: United Nations
and the World Bank, quoted in The World Guide 2003/2004.)

Giant lobelia growing

near Dessie

70
Further reading

Yeraswork Admassie Twenty Years to Nowhere: Property Rights, Land Management, and
Conservation in Ethiopia (Africa World Press /The Red Sea Press, 2000)
Donald Crummey Land and Society in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia (James Currey
Publications, 2000)
Wendy James et al. Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After (James Currey
Publications, 2002)
Donald N. Levine Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multi-ethnic Society, second
edition (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Harold Marcus A History of Ethiopia (University of California Press, 2002)
Nega Mezlekia Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood (Picador, 2002)
Fasil Nahum Constitution for a Nation of Nations: The Ethiopian Prospect (Red Sea Press,
1997)
Tekeste Negash and Kjetil Tronvoll Brothers at War: Making Sense of the
Eritrean-Ethiopian War (Ohio University Press, 2001)
Richard Pankhurst The Ethiopians: A History (Blackwell, 2001)
Wilfred Thesiger The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930-1934 (Flamingo,
1998)
Kjetil Tronvoll Ethiopia: A New Start? (Minority Rights Group International, 2000;
text on-line at www.minorityrights.org.uk)
Bahru Zewde A History of Modern Ethiopia 1855-1991 Qames Currey Publications, 2001)

Battery factory,
Addis Ababa

71
Oxfam GB in Ethiopia
O xfam was one of the first
international humanitarian
agencies to work in Ethiopia. Its first
grant for development work in Ethiopia
was made in 1962; an office was opened
in Addis Ababa in 1974, in the wake of a
major famine. Since then, a broad-based
programme of rehabilitation and
development work has been built up in
the northern, central, and eastern
highland regions, in lowland peripheral
areas in the east and south-west, and in
densely populated areas of the south.
During the 1984/85 famine, Oxfam
played a major role in the international
relief effort, organising food-distribution
and water-supply projects. When the
civil war ended in 1991, Oxfam's
priorities shifted towards longer-term
72
community-based development work.
Staff now support projects to recover
and improve exhausted farmland; to
conserve water and re-plant forests; and
to help marginalised groups, including
disabled people and households headed
by women, to earn an income. They are
helping to revive, repair, and install
community water supplies in several
areas of Ethiopia, and supporting health
programmes which emphasise the
welfare of mothers and children,
awareness and prevention of HIV/AIDS,
and the provision of community-based
family-planning services. Local partners
are supported to develop their capacity
to respond effectively to emergencies at
an early stage.
Oxfam staff mixing,
weighing, and
packing
supplementary food
rations for children,
pregnant women,
lactating mothers,
elderly people, and
disabled people.
The ration is a
mixture of maize
flour, milk powder,
and oil, which the
recipients mix with
water and cook to
make a porridge.